Reid Yalom

On my 2nd visit to Romania this year we spent a week visiting and photographing in the Black Sea region. Access to this important water way is so important to the economies of the countries in this region. Bulgaria, Ukraine...Russia etc. i was fascinated with the remains of the dozens if not hundreds of hotels and resorts constructed during the period of communist rule. My wife remembers distinctly, childhood visits to state owned hotels ...where most workers such as her parents were given vouchers for vacation visits. In the current era these resorts are in many cases falling into disrepair...The wealthier or even middle class Romanians prefer Greece or elsewhere and the concept of up-keeping former government property is not fully realized. However the beaches are quite lovely but zero wave action and limited snorkeling possibilities. Constanta the main port is a fascinating if a bit run down as well. The southern port of Mangalia is literally an ends of the earth place and fascinating for photography.

I am so fortunate to have been able to take several trips to Romania with my Romanian wife, Loredana. I brought with me all the baggage of previous photographic projects and experience but hopefully was open minded enough to let the country, and the scenery speak to me. The result and the beginning of this new ongoing project came top me in words and images: The Antidote is Color, Romania has an ancient history and an ancient language descended from the Romans. But as a nation it has mostly been a vassal state of other great powers: The Ottoman Empire, Austro Hungarian Hapsburgs, and more recently under Nazi and Soviet controlled influence. In the recent years as Romania has joined the democratic nations of Europe, the country has struggled in the economic spectrum. The highly educated population generally generally lacks in sufficient economic opportunity. The concept: The Antidote is Color, is that I have found in Romania an unusual plethora of colorful buildings, landscapes, graffiti, and simple everyday objects. Color makes you happy. Color is rebellion in an oppressive world. And the use of color in Romania far exceeding what we have in the United States. Returning home was going like in reverse while watching The Wizard of Oz turn from black and white to color. I think will let the images speak for them selves in this regard.

I am so fortunate to have been able to take several trips to Romania with my Romanian wife, Loredana. I brought with me all the baggage of previous photographic projects and experience but hopefully was open minded enough to let the country, and the scenery speak to me. The result and the beginning of this new ongoing project came top me in words and images: The Antidote is Color, Romania has an ancient history and an ancient language descended from the Romans. But as a nation it has mostly been a vassal state of other great powers: The Ottoman Empire, Austro Hungarian Hapsburgs, and more recently under Nazi and Soviet controlled influence. In the recent years as Romania has joined the democratic nations of Europe, the country has struggled in the economic spectrum. The highly educated population generally generally lacks in sufficient economic opportunity. The concept: The Antidote is Color, is that I have found in Romania an unusual plethora of colorful buildings, landscapes, graffiti, and simple everyday objects. Color makes you happy. Color is rebellion in an oppressive world. And the use of color in Romania far exceeding what we have in the United States. Returning home was going like in reverse while watching The Wizard of Oz turn from black and white to color. I think will let the images speak for them selves in this regard.

The current PBS presentation of Burns’ and Novak’s Documentary on the Vietnam War, has reawakened the public interest in Vietnam and the Vietnamese-American War. Episode 1, presents a brief history of the French colonial period and the French Indo-china war that preceded the American involvement.

The title of this Portfolio has several meanings. On the first level, it refers to the physical elements contained in the photographs, which I created during a series of visits to Vietnam over a 6-year period. I searched for the French colonial legacy as it exists today. This legacy goes back to the first French Jesuit missionaries and traders who went to Vietnam three centuries ago. It covers the period starting in the nineteenth century when France first invaded Vietnam, the French withdrawal from Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century, and the devastating wars for independence.

What is most surprising is that 21st Century Vietnam continues to rely on the underlying infrastructure created during the French colonial period. In the major cities of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC - formerly Saigon), Hanoi, Haiphong, Nam Dinh, and those in the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands, layouts of the streets, the parks, and the municipal buildings are of French design. Furthermore, the French left behind hospitals, churches, seminaries, schools, libraries, research institutions, prisons and courts, residential buildings, as well as a transportation infrastructure which includes roads, trains, ports, lighthouses, bridges, dams, dykes, and irrigation systems. While their work took place within the framework of a colonial system that used French architecture and know how, the Vietnamese people contributed the physical labor.

This unique series of images combines my 30 years as a black and white photographer with more recent ventures into color digital photography. Black and white photography is generally more compositionally based, and more subtle in its use of light and tone. Color digital work is more vibrant, more “real world”, at times superior for narrative work. I often feel that I am caught between these 2 different ways of seeing the world. These images combine both elements, and while each image may work as either a color or BW image these in-between prints are superior artistically to either one. I also find that these images have an optical illusion effect where the brain sometimes fills in color details while viewing. On another level, as the primary paradigm in photography, particularly in the fine art world, has evolved from black and white to color image making following developments in technology, the use of black and white image making I believe is becoming a convention, in the same way that depth of field is used now not only in photography but in painting. These in-between prints that combine black & white and color, as well as sometimes de-saturating or saturating the color imagery, become another convention, another method of using the mechanical tools of photography to further artistic expression

When summer departs and the sun drops low in the sky, the West Coast air is sprinkled with a galaxy of tiny moisture points and the light rays take on substance. The shadows stretch longer, become more angular and our visual reality is in flux. My photographic series, From the Shadows, is a view into this other world; the doppelganger world that lurks behind us, just around the corner or beneath the placid surface of the lake. It is the world we see when our eyes are closed or when dreams tumble into clarity.

The portfolio Landscapes at the Crossroads are a series of metaphorical landscapes that have been over a period of many years using both film and digital capture. These images attempt to take us to an inner-world rather than focusing us outward as in traditional landscape photography. I like to take a narrative; story telling approach but hope each image is more poetry than non-fiction. These generally focus on a combination or the interaction of man made objects and the natural world. This nexus can create this narrative, perhaps a paradox or even a visual anomaly that can act as a key to the door of the subconscious.

I am also a great admirer of the images and philosophy of Henri Cartier Bresson. In most of these landscapes the ‘Decisive Moment” applies. Sometimes it is instantaneous “Reflection 8”, “?” or “Cra-Cra Village”. For others is a bit more leisurely “Cloud Score”, “Out to Sea”, “Stormy Seas”, “ Tumbleweeds”, and for other this moment may stretch for hours and days. “Full Boat”, “Spilt Wheels”, Disappearing Tracks”.

And while much of contemporary photography is subject oriented, in my work what is most important is placing ourselves in the right relationship to the subject, and using everything at our disposal to create the composition that relates to the inner mood that we are either experiencing or wish to create. Furthermore I hope that these metaphorical landscapes, while outwardly traditional, verge into the world of the surreal - where the viewer's imagination plays a significant role in the experience of viewing the artwork. I also hope the viewer finds a little humor and irony in my work.

Colonial Noir was published in hard back Book by Stanford University Press in 2004. This series photographed over a period of 5 years in Mexico, makes the connection between, Film Noir, the European Surrealist movement and Magical Realism in Latin American Literature. All prints are fiber prints from medium format film.

After viewing several large exhibitions of modern art, mostly abstract art, I began seeing and photographing similar images in the real world. The main influences here are the New York school of Abstract expressionists as well as West Coast more figurative work. Artist of influence include: Rothko, Motherwell. De Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollack, Plaul Klee, Nathan Olivera, Malevich, Rodechenko, Modrian, Ed Rusha, Rufino Tamayo and others. As this series develops some of these are pure Yalom as well.

These images are personal selections from 25 years of making film based archival silver prints. I am particularly fond of making high-toned at times minimalist images and prints particularly from silver based prints, where the balance is more white and light gray than the dark tones. Original vintage prints from 1990-2012 are available.

The American Resting Place was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. the book was written by Marilyn Yalom with images by Reid Yalom.

Everyday Beauty combines the best aspects of old and new photographic technology to create a unique vision sharing both photographic and painterly qualities, marrying the objective with the subjective and the image with the process. The idea comes from the concept of taking everyday objects and beautifying them into something perhaps best described as hyper-real. At the heart of this work is a 90 year-old brass photographic portrait lens that has unique and distinctive visual qualities designed to beautify or glamorize the likes of silent movie stars. This 1920’s lens was designed for studio usage and long exposures and did not originally include even a timed shutter nor post WWII anti-reflective, color corrective lens coatings. It has been married to a 1950’s large format shutter, mounted onto a modern (1990) era Linhof view camera and equipped to shoot modern medium and large format color negative film. This film is scanned at high resolution, processed through Photoshop as digital darkroom and output into archival pigment prints on fine-art textured paperThis process creates a unique rubric for the photographic process: generally bright lightening situations including reflective surfaces or neon lights, the choice of scenes with a clear central focus and situations calling for shallow depth of field. The result has been to create images in which everyday objects are highlighted, glamorized, idealized; perhaps somewhat akin to how media has always treated and built up celebrities. American objects – a tire swing, hotel signs, amusement rides, farm equipment, factory buildings, streets, old planes, trains and trucks, etc., become beautiful in a in a hyper-realistic way that is lifted and separated from the surrounding world. The resulting images are both thought provocative to the photographer/photographic collector and highly accessible to the painting/print collectors.This series is printed on 17” X 22” paper in a limited edition of 25 per image. A very small edition of 6 will be printed at 36” X 44”.

This Portfolio was made over an intense 3 day weekend in NYC in 3 primary locals: Coney Island, Brooklyn, on a Sabbath morning among Hassidic Jews and in "tourist" New York" I worked with 2 small Mirrorless cameras using Leica and Minolta fixed lenses. Modern technology doing traditional Street photography.