Nick Schietromo
We all see these photographs. We see them at Grandma’s house framed with love on the dining room walls or in the upstairs hallway near the room where you slept as a child. In albums, loose in boxes found in your Dad and Mom’s attic. Albums reviewed at a family reunion. Loaded with sentiment and perhaps nostalgic impulses they play a role in our lives. Then often times we see them at thrift stores, estate sales, antique fairs, scattered in old shoe boxes, stacked in envelopes. These once personal and cherished images become lost and distant from their family homes. Never the less they become a part of the fabric of our collective experience forever present in our minds eye. Conscious, unconscious, these intimate details printed on paper are part of a broader human narrative.
Nick finds himself gathering, searching, culling these images that have lost their homes their family, their sentimentality. Beautifully bringing them to us renewed, distorted, in disarray. Mangled digitally or perhaps enhanced in this fashion. Taking these found images from someone’s experience and putting them into another realm, another breath. These works are renewed in an imbalanced sense of lost sentiment, a distorted yet beautiful nostalgia that pulls us in and makes us question and perhaps makes us remember.
- Steven J. Duede, Fine Art Photographer
Through digital manipulation via binary code corruption of these found vernacular photographs, I am reassigning image value within a social archive. The new image creates a questioning of the societal shift from storing and exchanging analogue images to the storing and sharing of the digital files, and ones intra/interpersonal relationship to this imagery.
Years Later
Each trip to a flea market, yard sale, or thrift shop is a unique find. While rummaging through shoeboxes and hand woven baskets, I search for precious memories of domestic pasts via the anonymous photograph. These prized possessions, once intended to be stuck to refrigerators, thumbed through in albums with intimacy and care, are now displayed for all to pillage through in estate sales. Now void of their original context and stripped of identity, these objects exist with bent corners, faded coloring and patinas offering endless narratives. The more antique images I discover, I wonder what photographs from present day would look like in the future. Will we treat the digital decay of a photograph as fondly as a well-worn print corner or a faded and stained image in a frame? Through digital manipulation via binary code corruption of these found vernacular photographs, I am reassigning image value within a social archive. The new image creates a questioning of the societal shift from storing and exchanging analogue images to the storing and sharing of the digital files, and ones intra/interpersonal relationship to this imagery.
- Nick Schetromo 2016
Nick Schietromo
BIO
Nick Schietromo is an artist based in Greater Boston. He works with various aspects of domesticity and vernacular imagery to make photographic based pieces. His work has been in exhibitions across the region, including the Mills Gallery in Boston, Boston Sculptors Gallery and the Vermont Center for Photography. He has also been featured in the publications Aint-Bad Magazine, F-Stop Magazine and Lightleaked. Schietromo is the recipient of a 2015 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and a Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward Honorable Mention.
Visit: www.nickschietromo.com