LOOKING AGAIN

A large part of this summer was spent returning to work I thought I already knew.

I began by photographing more than one hundred of my father Frank Rampolla’s large paintings in high resolution. I have lived with many of these paintings for years, but photographing them one at a time required me to spend more time with each of them. In doing that, I came away with a better understanding of his work and a greater appreciation for something I had not fully recognized before. His paintings do not resolve themselves immediately. They take time, and the longer I stayed with them, the more I understood that this was part of what made the work so compelling.

At the same time, I found myself doing something similar with my own photographs.

Much of that happened through making books. With What the Land Remembers, photographs I had made over years along the Hillsborough River began to feel less like individual landscapes and more about time, memory, and the people who had moved through that land long before me. Sequencing the photographs changed the way I saw them. Images began to affect one another, and relationships appeared that were not as obvious when I considered each photograph on its own.

The same thing happened with The Distance Between. I brought together photographs from Held in Bone, Immanence, and Dignity, bodies of work I had always considered separately. As I worked through the sequence, a kind of synergy developed between the photographs. Images made years apart began to speak to one another, and connections emerged that I had not recognized when I made them.

I also returned to Dignity and made a new edition of that book. The photographs had not changed, but I had, and naturally I saw some of them differently. Editing and sequencing them again made that especially clear.

Looking back, I realized that much of the summer had been spent doing essentially the same thing.

Looking again.