|
South Dakota, 1993
Photographer's Forum 2006 National Competition |
Richard Rapfogel -
Fine Art Photography
Web:
http://www.Rapfogel.com
Email: Rick@Rapfogel.com
For more than forty years
my photography has been a means of engaging with, more fully experiencing,
and better understanding the layering of meaning that resides below the
surface of life. My work reflects a number of influences, ranging from
early training and mentoring by the author and photographer John Howard
Griffin to the inspiration of such photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Edward Weston, Marie Cosindas, and many, many others. As would be predicted
by such a diverse list, my photographs are quite varied in subject matter:
images of people in India and elsewhere, graffiti-laden walls, and studies
of a single forested acre in North Carolina.
|
|
In photographing my
world I both observe and participate in it, creating images that reveal
a common artistic impulse: to participate in life by looking, to allow
oneself to be touched and influenced by what one sees, to articulate that
experience, and, hopefully, to illuminate it. My photographs reflect not
only “what’s out there,” but also who I am, how I see, and what I make of
what I see. The physical record of those moments of living allows me to
share them and, perhaps more fundamentally, to re-experience them.
The opportunity to “take a
second look” at my experiences is among the more sublime pleasures of
photography, because in that process I often see more deeply than I find
possible in the blur of time. It is this process, rather than the specific
content of any given image, that moves me to lift the camera to my eye. I
shoot what I resonate to, and that is why my images are so varied, ranging
from portrait to landscape, from figurative to abstract.
In my prior career as a
psychotherapist, I often perceived strengths in my clients where they
believed they had none. This incongruity was a catalyst for their
re-examination of what they had thought to be “truths” about themselves. As
a photographer, too, I tend to see beauty – and irony and humor and pain and
dignity – in aspects of life that might otherwise pass as mundane. Often my
subjects differ greatly from myself in culture and convention. Yet it is
the human relationship shared between us that is recorded on film. I hope
that each image embraces that moment of connection and, in the revealed pentimento, sheds light on its depth.
Richard Rapfogel's
photographs have won numerous international and regional photography
competitions and have appeared in top photography journals, such as
Photography Review and Photographer's Forum. . |
Calcutta, 1968
In Photography Review Best of 2006
Beaver Dam, North Carolina, 2004
First Prize, Landscape, Appalachian Mt. Photo Competition
Tamilnadu, India, 2001
Winner, 2004 Banff International Photo Competition
|
