Mauro Marinelli: Burden of Wings - Tapa dura

Reseña del editor

I used the Polaroid as a painter might use a sketchpad. I shot freely and, as the images appeared, I loved how the Polaroid interpreted what I saw. The limitations of the plastic lens softened the features captured in stone; the softened stone wings became real wings.

Mauro Marinelli's iconic cemetery images captured on Polaroid juxtapose the inherent contradictions of the immediate moment: instant and everlasting. In homage to the sixteenth-century style of Nature Morte, the stone of mortuary sculptures softens like flesh and graveside tokens and bouquets of flowers depict life becoming death.

Biografía del autor

Mauro Marinelli is an artist, photographer, contractor, great cook, one-time novitiate, and former photojournalist, living in upstate New York. Born and raised in White Plains, New York to Italian immigrant parents, he earned a BFA in in Photography and English from Manhattanville College in 1977. In the late 1970s Mauro traveled around the US to photograph the last of the original Italian immigrants before they were gone.
Fed up with Madison Avenue and the demands of commercial photography, Marinelli moved away from New York City to upstate New York where he farmed culinary herbs and established a successful contracting business. In the 1980s and early 90s, Marinelli exhibited his photographs at the Italian American Museums of San Francisco and the Bronx. In the last decade he has returned to his photography and completed three personal photo essays one of which is The Burden of Wings.