Paul D’Amato, Out of Place

For its inaugural exhibition, Yossi Milo Gallery (formerly known as Gallery 24) is proud to present the first solo exhibition in New York of the photographer Paul D'Amato. Entitled Out of Place, the exhibition opens on Thursday, September 6 and closes on Saturday, October 27, 2001.

Consisting of color photographs taken from 1990-2000, Out of Place reflects Mr. D'Amato's interest in capturing uninhibited expressions of human theater. The photographs in the exhibition depict diverse settings (e.g., the Mexican community in the Chicago neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village; men's social clubs in New England; and the rave/club scene in New Orleans, Chicago, and the East Coast). But the exhibition brings these images together to emphasize a way of seeing humanity that focuses less on a specific location and more on the feelings conveyed.

Examples of this approach abound in the images from Chicago's Mexican community, which Mr. D'Amato photographed over the course of several summers. The earlier images have their roots in the tradition of urban street photography, not only because of summer's emphasis on the outdoors [Girl in Shopping Cart, Isela, Girl in Spray (from open pump), 1993] but also because of Mr. D'Amato's outsider status. A 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship provided a crucial turning point, enabling the artist to spend a year in Pilsen. This allowed Mr. D'Amato to make connections with the residents and to gain access inside, literally and figuratively [Junior and Janessa, 2000].

Mr. D'Amato does not attempt to document, comprehensively and objectively, the residents of these neighborhoods. Instead, he seeks to express the simple drama of everyday life as it is played out in urban environments [Blue Boy, Portland, Maine, 1990].

Paul D'Amato's work is in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and the Reader's Digest Collection. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Maine Arts Commission Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Grant, and he was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Bellagio, Italy.

Born in 1956, Mr. D'Amato received a B.A. from Reed College and an M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art. Paul D'Amato lives with his wife, the painter Anne Harris, and their son Max in the Chicago area, where he is an associate professor at Columbia College.