Andrew Anello
508-990-0548
andy@danky.com
 
STUDIO ADDRESS
123 Sawyer St. Unit #1

New Bedford, MA 02746
 
MEDIUM: Photography, Video, Installation
 
I am interested in photography's dual nature. Both opaque and revealing, images are used to bring us closer to people, places, and events that we have not experienced, just as they serve to distance us from those same subjects.  By their very nature, images supply us with some information (what's in the frame), and withhold so much more (what is out of the frame).  They expose us to traumas that are not our own (the news), and hide from us traumas we may have experienced (smiling family portraits).  My work explores issues of identity formation, trauma, and repression through the use of lens-based media.

In “Other Peoples’ Pictures,” I document the phenomenon of amateur digital photography among my peers in nightclubs and bars in New York City and Boston.    By using the flashes from their digital cameras to expose my film, I am effectively “stealing” their photos.  Part anthropology, part appropriation, this project explores the ways that the now ubiquitous digital camera is used to construct and affirm identity.   The photographs taken by my subjects become proof of (and sometimes a substitute for) their experiences.  My presence adds a third layer to the equation, complicating the relationship between photographer and subject.

My latest series, American Horror, uses the vernacular of popular horror films to ask what it means to be blind to a system that you are a part of.  Filmed in long, static takes, and exhibited as loops, the 4 videos that make up American Horror are drained of the narrative tension typically present in horror movies.  They instead present the consumption of violence as a banal, forgettable, and inextricable part of contemporary American consciousness.