Bio of Robert RICHFIELD
Robert Richfield (b. 1947, Covington, KY) was raised in Cincinnati, OH. Taking interest in photography as a teenager, he left the Midwest in 1965 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. There, he received a BFA in 1969, followed by a MFA in 1972. While matriculating at RISD, the young photographer studied with and was profoundly influenced by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. He worked for his mentor Siskind as a printer from 1980 to 1984.
Richfield has traveled extensively throughout his career, frequenting the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, and Mexico, producing multiple panel, color, panorama photographs of industrial, and industrialized sites, transportation portals, gardens, architectural views, and delicate cemetery ironwork. Richfield surveys his subjects with a series of large format negative views often showing a full 360º around the “point of view”, so we are given not only a detailed view of his subject but also the entire contextual environment.
Richfield seems to love train stations, especially English ones. The structure of their aluminum or steel ribbed glass overhangs work perfectly, rhythmically, with the black lines which separate each of the panorama’s panels. The architecture of the space and that of the picture support each other’s presence. Time is also a featured element in these images; as trains enter and leave the stations they often disappear between adjacent panels, reappearing as blurs further down the platform.
Cemeteries of France and England are Richfield’s most recent interest, or more specifically, he is attracted to the memorial ironwork of angels and religious symbols used as grave-side decoration. For these Richfield turns the path of his panoramas 90º to describe these decorative objects vertically rather than horizontally.
The photographs, only 10 to 24 inches high are long, some more than 10 feet in length. They all are imbued with Richfield’s highly developed eye for exquisite detail and his observations which tend toward the wry and the witty.
He has exhibited widely here and abroad. He was in the important 1998 exhibition The Expanded Image at the Addison Gallery. His most recent exhibition was a show of recent work at the Alan Klotz Gallery in summer of 2007.
His work is in private and corporate collections and in public institutions such as The Art Institute of Chicago; The Getty Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Center for Creative Photography; The High Museum, Atlanta and The Cincinnati Art Museum.
Richfield currently lives and works in West Newton, Massachusetts.
Richfield has traveled extensively throughout his career, frequenting the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, and Mexico, producing multiple panel, color, panorama photographs of industrial, and industrialized sites, transportation portals, gardens, architectural views, and delicate cemetery ironwork. Richfield surveys his subjects with a series of large format negative views often showing a full 360º around the “point of view”, so we are given not only a detailed view of his subject but also the entire contextual environment.
Richfield seems to love train stations, especially English ones. The structure of their aluminum or steel ribbed glass overhangs work perfectly, rhythmically, with the black lines which separate each of the panorama’s panels. The architecture of the space and that of the picture support each other’s presence. Time is also a featured element in these images; as trains enter and leave the stations they often disappear between adjacent panels, reappearing as blurs further down the platform.
Cemeteries of France and England are Richfield’s most recent interest, or more specifically, he is attracted to the memorial ironwork of angels and religious symbols used as grave-side decoration. For these Richfield turns the path of his panoramas 90º to describe these decorative objects vertically rather than horizontally.
The photographs, only 10 to 24 inches high are long, some more than 10 feet in length. They all are imbued with Richfield’s highly developed eye for exquisite detail and his observations which tend toward the wry and the witty.
He has exhibited widely here and abroad. He was in the important 1998 exhibition The Expanded Image at the Addison Gallery. His most recent exhibition was a show of recent work at the Alan Klotz Gallery in summer of 2007.
His work is in private and corporate collections and in public institutions such as The Art Institute of Chicago; The Getty Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Center for Creative Photography; The High Museum, Atlanta and The Cincinnati Art Museum.
Richfield currently lives and works in West Newton, Massachusetts.