Joe Vitone
Joe Vitone
Family Records
September 3–28, 2014
In 1998 artist Joe Vitone began photographing his immediate and extended family, lovingly documenting multiple generations living in or near Akron, Ohio. Culled from more than 1,000 of the artist’s large-format negatives, these black-and-white and color portraits, along with their corresponding anecdotal texts and detailed family trees, tell personal yet universal stories of hope and loyalty in the face of hardship. Not only does Family Records serve as a stunning record of Vitone’s family history, but his engaging images easily draw viewers into this clan’s fold.
“The photographs generate dialogues between one another at a number of levels, some directly, as in lineage and interpersonal relation of mother to daughter, father to son, or brother to sister, and some at less specific and more universal places as well. Comment is made on time and aging, on moving from childhood to adulthood, on relations sustained or lost through the years, on masculinity and femininity, on sensuality and beauty seen not only in youth but in age, and on our valuing of ourselves and others not only because of our strengths but, perhaps even more so, by reason of our vulnerabilities.”
Joe Vitone is a documentary fine art photographer and Professor of Photocommunications at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas where he has lived with his family since 1991. His work has been exhibited at many venues, including the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, Instituto Cultural Peruano-Norteamericano in Lima, Peru, and the Houston Center for Photography. His work is held in a number of collections including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History. In 2001 he was a senior Fulbright scholar in fine art, teaching and working on a photography project centered around small scale family based agriculture in Costa Rica. This is Vitone’s second solo exhibition at Blue Sky.