Craig Mammano
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A FEW SQUARE BLOCKS
In 2006, Craig Mammano moved to Treme, in the 7th Ward of New
Orleans. The neighborhood is one of the city’s oldest, and Mammano
recognized that it had become disconnected from both other parts
of the city and the rest of the country. “Following the largest natural
disaster in U.S. history,” he explains, “the media coverage had slowed
to a point that the only images of the city being shown were of Mardi
Gras, or volunteers gutting houses. Knowing there was an aftermath
that I wasn’t seeing, I went to see things for myself, and began to
focus on the survival and isolation I witnessed in the neighborhood.”
Mammano’s portraits employ an unapologetic rawness in style
and approach that shifts notions of sexualization and exploitation
from the implicit to the explicit. His subjects, women who pose
both clothed and unclothed, oscillate between elegance and
desperation, confronting the viewer with a brazen openness that is
equally refreshing and disconcerting. Both literally and figuratively,
these women bare themselves to the camera, and assume a
nakedness of spirit as well as of body that is rarely achieved within
the contemporary photographic portrait. Instead of cloaking the
female – and in particular the female nude – in sexual performance,
fantasy, lust, and desire, as so much of American media does today,
Mammano’s roughly hewn pictures genuinely uncover his subjects’
individuality, presenting them as candidly as possible. Both the
photographs and the women possess, to borrow from Walker Evans,
a “purity and a certain severity, rigor, simplicity, directness,
clarity…
without artistic pretension in a self-conscious sense of the word.”
BIOGRAPHY
Artist and photographer, Craig Mammano was born in 1975 in New
Jersey. He studied at Hunter College, The City University of New York
and received a B.A. in art studio. Later, he worked in the archives of
the Black Star Photo Agency in New York and assisting documentary
photographer Joseph Rodriguez. His photographs have been featured
on Tiny Vices, an online gallery and image archive; The Sunday
Times, London; Hamburger Eyes Photo Magazine, issue 013; and
Kaugummi magazine # 5. He has exhibited at the Association of
Photographers Gallery, London; Home Space Gallery, New Orleans;
and Permanent Gallery, Brighton, United Kingdom.