Photographer and videographer Mauro Altamura received his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo and his BA from Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. His photographs have been published in Aperture Magazine and La Recherche Photographique. Altamura is also a short story writer and an Assistant Professor of Photography at New Jersey City University.
This particular series of his work has been created by scanning well-known, historical photographs from textbooks, and cropping out all information except the solitary individual. Altamura explains, “The person stands alone, isolated from his/her context and any intended meaning. These anonymous people may be in a picture that is famous, but in that relationship their image exists solely as the non-identified bystander or a figure that is part of the overall composition and form of a photograph. They have become, in essence, non-persons. By physically dissecting the image to reverse the figure/ground relation, by making the anonymous person the sole occupier of the picture plane, I am attempting to deconstruct and flip the hierarchical authority of the image. The issue, therefore, is to construct a model that reveals the unacknowledged and by extension (and metaphor) considers alternate histories and people. These people, who have been unknowingly photographed, who are part of the photographer’s ‘composition’ are the anonymous and the unrecognized. This work is an attempt to prioritize their individual existence.”
His work has appeared in shows at City Without Walls in Newark and VertexList in Brooklyn, NY, as well as solo exhibits at the State Museum of New Jersey and the Jersey City Museum, where his work is part of their collections. Mauro Altamura's work also appears in many other public and private collections including those of the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, and the Polytechnic Institute in Tokyo, Japan.
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