Rachel Portesi | Standing Still Artist Talk

Join us online in the Griffin Zoom Room on Tuesday November 8, 2022 from 7 to 8pm for a conversation with artist Rachel Portesi, whose work was on the walls of the Griffin in her exhibition Standing Still

This event is FREE to Griffin Museum members. $10 for Non Members. Interested in Membership and its benefits? See more about what the Griffin offers here.

About Rachel Portesi –

I have been shooting polaroids since October 15th,1995 on various polaroid land cameras. I shot them when polaroid stopped making film, when fuji picked up where polaroid left off, and recently stopped when fuji stopped making the film I used in my camera. I truly didn’t know what to do when my film was gone and I refused to buy discontinued film at twice the price. Somehow that just took the freedom away. It was time to move on.

I love film and analog creative materials in general but there was something I really missed about making polaroids. I had been shooting street photographs with the handicap of a cumbersome, competitively slow polaroid camera stuck on timer. I loved the way what caught my eye is never what I got in the end, the waiting for the image to develop, the instant gratification, the feeling of Christmas when peeling back the paper to see what I did get, and the way each is one of a kind.

Eventually, an even older, more finicky, time-consuming way of making “instant pictures” caught my attention; wet plate collodion tintypes. Somehow the much slower but still instant process of wet plate photography holds the same magic.  When the exposed and developed plate sits in the fixer, a negative image appears, then slowly shifting in a bluish cloud, then into a positive. The created image magically appears! The excitement for making images was back for me and I never cease to marvel at the surprising miracle it seems to be.