"The Outwin 2016" Finalist: Paul D'Amato

Out of over 2,500 entries in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, 43 artists have their work shown in the exhibition “The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today.” Read more about one of the finalists, Paul D’Amato.

What about the sitter inspired you?

I sat behind Mrs. Tisdell for two years at the Original Providence Baptist Church. She was such a gracious person, just as elegant in her manner as she was in her dress. I looked forward to chatting with her every Sunday and would be disappointed if some reason she occasionally didn’t make it to service. On this day, her daughter was late picking her up and so I suggested we make a portrait while she waited. But when she arrived, I knew the two of them together would make a much better image. Just as gracious as her mother, and a former model, the daughter didn’t take much convincing. Mrs. Tisdell passed away a few months after this picture was made.

What made you decide to depict this sitter as you did?

I have looked a lot at Spanish painting, particularly Goya and Valazquez. I love when grays and blacks can seem to be full of color and feeling. The somberness of the overcast light and the gray formal-ness of the arch of the church entrance worked well with what they were wearing.  This is punctuated by the yellow of the hat, gloves and purse which make what one might describe as the non-color of the whole image feel essential and purposeful in a color image.

What relationship do the materials have to the meaning?

I have spent as much time looking at painting as I have photography. I even, for a short time, tried to be a painter but learned that I didn’t have the patience to be in one room for better of every week of every year. As I mentioned above, I am still inspired by what painters have done, particularly in portraiture. At the same time, I love how photography allows me to be in the world and occasionally discover how the formal precision that exists in art can seem to exist in an on-going way all around us. The best photographs offer a kind of proof that world has a formal, psychological perfection – that this isn’t just an invention of the studio and that, possibly, the best painters know this too which is why their work is so convincing. 

How does the piece fit within your larger body of work?

This image is part of a twelve year project on the west side of Chicago called “HereStillNow”. I am preparing this work for publication next fall and the following is the afterword:

There is nothing particularly unique, emblematic or historic about the west side of Chicago. The significance of this work has little to do with the fact Dr. King, for a short time, used to reside here, or that it nearly burnt to the ground after he was assassinated, or that it was once home to the most infamous housing project in the United States. It’s not the poorest, the oldest, the largest, or the most African-American of African-American communities in the U.S. In so many ways, the west side is typical. We know because sociologists tell us so. They have rates and percentages for measuring places like the west side: percentages of families living below the poverty line; rate of unemployment; rate of violent crime; percentage of teenage pregnancy etc. And, according to these metrics, the west side is just like every other swath of poverty in and around every single city in the U.S.

We are all well aware of these neighborhoods because every day we routinely drive around them. Whether it’s Lower 9th Ward, Roxbury, Watts, Ferguson, East St Louis and Englewood, we are lulled in into ignoring their existence, as the people who live there become they and them, instead of he and she. We are led to also believe that the only time these communities are in crisis is when something occurs that lands on a front page. The real crisis, however, is on-going and it’s one of acceptance - acceptance of the conditions, day in day out, all year long, that lead to something that journalists only occasionally pay attention to.

Yet, when I’m there, when I’m visiting someone I know, or simply stopping someone I’ve never met, something besides a concern for poverty takes shape. This is what I photograph. It varies from picture to picture. It can be about a kind of grace or beauty; or perhaps it can be just about the opportunity to do something out of the ordinary—to pose for a picture, and help make something that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. When these subjects agree to be photographed, they stand for the best and only example of who they are. At that moment, they are the center of the universe, right here, holding still, right now. What follows - these photographs - won’t change these neighborhoods but each of these interactions and the pictures that are a consequence, can do something that statistics and sensational news stories can’t. They remind us that we are all connected, that the individuals in the images aren’t they or them, they are he and she and are as important as any one of us.

You can see D’Amato’s work in “The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today,” up now through Jan. 8, 2017. Also, be sure to vote in our People’s Choice Competition.