2008 Portfolio Prize Winner: Michael Corridore

Michael Corridore’s project, Angry Black Snake, is an exercise in minimalism. Each image has been pared down to the barest of elements;urgent gestures and barely traceable figures cloaked in smoke and dust. Yet each image pulses with palpable emotional tension, telegraphed by these barest of representational sketches and the subtle shifting colors of the clouds that descend upon each scene like a flimsy curtain.

As Corridore describes it, the project began as part of a larger portrayal of spectators at various events, including auto races, but became increasingly focused on those few moments in which the event and the landscape in which it take place come into direct and violent contact, for all intents and purposes eliding the spectator from the scene almost entirely. Car race or apocalyptic collision, the true nature of these events is never fully disclosed. Behind the scrim of kicked up particulate matter, however, it’s evident that there is something afoot. The few discernable figures raise their arms—in victory, or perhaps to call out in distress; eyes are covered or screened for a better view. The work is remarkable for its use of restraint as a strategy to immerse the viewer in an indecipherable yet tangible Sturm und Drang.

Michael Corridore is a graduate of Photography Studies College, Australia. He has had solo shows in Australia and the U.S., and opens an exhibition of this work in January 2009 at the Australian Centre for Photography. Corridore currently lives between New York City and Sydney, Australia.