Melissa Ann Pinney
Artist Statement
My photographs in Signals & Mysteries bear witness to inner city public schools, providing a vision of the students’ fierce & fragile world informed by moments of spontaneous play, self-presentation and gesture. I never know what the children will do next; their beauty, their conflicts, their compassion are unrehearsed. The students become active participants in the art-making, not by posing but by inviting me into their world. I am after the mystery and surprise of each moment. Sometimes a student looks directly into the camera as if to ask: Do you see me? Do you really see me?
Artist Bio
Melissa Ann Pinney’s closely-observed studies of the social lives and emerging identities of American women have won the photographer numerous fellowships and awards, and found their way into the collections of the major museums in the US and abroad. Her evocative photographs of the stages of life in American women earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship and resulted in her first major monograph, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls, 2003. Pinney’s next book, Girl Ascending, 2010, was followed by TWO, with Ann Patchett in 2015. Pinney’s current project is Signals & Mysteries: Photographs from Chicago Public Schools.
Pricing
24”x30”, Archival print, $3000 each
