whitehot | More About WM's Ben Pezzillo
It's Luca's favorite chew toy.
I am a photographer. So to me, writing is yet another form of visual communication. The words need to JUMP out at you and move quickly, efficiently to the point. Writing is not something I ever considered doing until I got to college. There were so many people doing it poorly I figured I could get lost in the crowd. My English and Textual Studies professors at Syracuse University would criticize my brevity while a magazine journalism professor named Al Balk taught me more about writing with his blue pen in one term paper than anyone else ever would. You can always spot an original mind and Syracuse had plenty of them. The ones in the ETS program were difficult to reach at the undergraduate level but I do remember hearing Mary Karr reading from Liars Club and knew it wouldn’t be the last time I heard that writer’s name or that title. I also left ETS with a solid understanding of post-structuralism and I try to incorporate that into my art photography to this day, layer upon layer, society upon society. Buildings, roads, tunnels, bridges, powerlines with only a trace of life captured by the lights of a passing car streaking through the pixels of my digital images. I choose the nocturnal urbanscape because it shows even our rest is dependent upon an underlying world around us which moves slightly quieter at night -- still there in spotted darkness, processing the last day and preparing for the next one. At this point in our society’s intellectual development, I believe original philosophy is becoming increasingly difficult to generate. If you have thought about doing something, chances are someone else is already doing it, so now we must swim among one another’s ideas. Doing them better if we can because they are the water we drink and the air we breathe. Whether we realize it or not. Feeding us by diffusion. As for my work with Whitehot, I try to over-compensate for my lack of knowledge from skipping art history by inflicting my own style upon things. But now that Whitehot has attracted some incredible art writers, I mostly want to focus on perfecting environmental artist portraits and learn from my better experienced colleagues. Besides, I’m busy learning how to ride a motorcycle to better connect with my art photography subject matter.
whitehot gallery images, click a thumbnail.
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