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Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Staten Island Encounters: Photographs by Olga Ginzburg.
Belarus-born, New York-based street and documentary photographer, Olga Ginzburg captures the uncanny in the unremarkable and the majesty of the quotidian.
Empathically intimate, Ginzburg’s images aren’t voyeuristic glimpses, rather one notes the ease of the photographer within the environment and the natural rapport she has with the subjects. This is a function born not only of Olga’s innate predilection, but also the particularities of her formal concerns and personal narrative.
While fully welcoming of technical advancements, Ginzburg particularly enjoys shooting in film for its dialogue with the medium’s history and a film camera’s ability to cast her in a more “meditative” state while working.
This component of valuing tradition – a confidence that precedent can sustain - is paralleled in her own biography, where after years of living in Manhattan and working and studying abroad, circumstance redelivered her to the South Shore Staten Island neighborhood of her formative years. Her immersive reacquaintance with the streets, people and landscape of her youth is the subject of this exhibit.
With this body of work the photographer also demonstrates another more abstract kind of homecoming: that of letting her originating artistic inspirations inhabit and flourish within her imagination.
In an interview with the online photography magazine of the land & us, Olga describes the initial sensation of the emergence of her artistic interiority this way: “Without realizing it, I started to look at the world differently. I became more curious and observant. I walked around imbued with Kertész’s lyricism, Brassaï’s misty romanticism, Winogrand’s bravado and sense of the absurd, [Boris] Mikhailov’s irony, [Milton] Rogovin’s humanity, Frank’s unsentimental poetry etc.”
In her mature work these exemplars - coupled with the persisting thrill of their discovery - are sustained as components of an integrated point of view – a neighborhood unto itself. In acceptance, Ginzburg’s work confirms that fidelity to one’s nature and loves can yield a singular vision under surprising circumstances, including that of an unanticipated adult return to one’s teenage home.
Staten Island Encounters: Photographs by Olga Ginzburg runs through November 2 and is on view at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). There will be a finissage for the artist on Friday, November 2, 6-8 pm.
