Speaker: Paolo Morales

My artistic practice is grounded in the black and white darkroom and alternative photographic processes. I utilize the aesthetics of modernist, straight, documentary photography while offering an alternate narrative. My hybrid process of optical enlargements from black and white negatives and contact prints from digital negatives acknowledges the history of photographic medium while also pushing it forward, all from the positionality of an Asian-American male.

I am currently absorbed by two projects. In Memphis Tulips, I photograph and collaborate with a working-class community in Philadelphia where people seek to take care of each other in the face of shared adversity. The people in my pictures are welcoming me as an outsider—someone different racially and socially—while also insulating themselves from the gentrification bubbling around them. In Flowering Dogwood, my pictures seek to answer a question: can a photograph be racialized? As an Asian male photographing in suburban and urban environments, the gaze of individuals looking back at me, the viewer, and the camera embodies feelings of distance and suspicion. My pictures show people who are desperate for connection while being distrustful of the world around them. 

As a resident of Philadelphia, I seek to frame my talk in the political landscape of 2024, and in the future 2025 when this talk will be delivered, to think about the actual and political landscape of Pennsylvania. I will reflect on other artists who make work in Pennsylvania (LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs of her family versus Walker Evans’ pictures in Bethlehem) and how their pictures create a framework for racializing the photograph. 

Biography:

Paolo Morales is a photographer. Solo exhibitions include Delaware County Community College (2022), Cabrini University (2021), XYZ Art Gallery at VirginiaTech (2020), The George Washington University (2018), and Hamiltonian Gallery (2018). Group exhibitions include Ogden Museum of Southern Art (2019), New York Asian Film Festival (2018), Capital One Bank Headquarters (2017), and ClampArt (2015), among others. Publications include VICE Magazine, Papersafe Magazine, The Washington Post, Dazed, and The New Yorker. He was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, a 2016-2018 Fellow at Hamiltonian Artists, and an artist-in-residence at Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. 

Morales received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Bucknell University. He was born and raised in New York City and lives with his wife and corgi in Philadelphia.