2008 Portfolio Prize Runner Up: Elizabeth Pedinotti

“My photographs are recreations of memories I do not have… These images end up exploring the way perspective alters everything.” —Elizabeth Pedinotti

Elizabeth Pedinotti addresses the issues of childhood memories in meticulously composed conceptual photographic tableaux. An essential tension animates almost every picture with an immediacy, an articulateness of gesture, a strong sense of color and composition, and an unusual perspective. The narrative is filled in single frames, intriguingly poised between abstraction and figuration. Pedinotti’s staged photographs elaborate on seemingly insignificant moments she has experienced, investing otherwise benign, forgettable gestures and routines with imaginative potency by restaging and embellishing them with extreme close-ups and oblique perspectives. They become an open-ended description of something that we think we know, but most often overlook or bluntly ignore—such as the hair torn from a brush, only to be discarded. Pedinotti has an ability to imbue images with a layered narrative, allowing the particular instant of a still photograph to open into a more complex arena. She relies on our ability to recognize the combination of character and prop as a pivotal moment in the story.

With her extreme visual curiosity, Pedinotti turns the innocent trappings of domesticity—piles of laundry, ice cream cones, spoonfuls of medicine—into darkly humorous moments, engaging us and turning our attention inward, to our own imaginations. A subtly hued image, almost a detail, of fabric catching fire over a stove walks this narrow line between torture and play, tenderness and terror, innocence and manipulation. By focusing on the insignificant moment or object, Pedinotti amplifies its significance, demonstrating how our imaginations can be triggered by even the most ordinary moments and things. It is a body of work that elaborates on deeply felt personal experience.

Elizabeth Pedinotti holds a BA in photography from the State University of New York, Albany. Her work has been included in group shows throughout the U.S. She is currently enrolled in the photography MFA program at the San Francisco Art Institute.