Shirley Dawson’s Review
August 28, 2007
A very nice review from critic Shirley M. Dawson appeared in the August 22 City Newspaper.
From Rochester’s Signature Photographic Style:
Lucky for me, the “Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition” at the Memorial Art Gallery, that bell weather of Upstate New York art, is still on view and full of photography. And yes, there are some obvious trends, namely black-and-white stills of graffiti walls, lonely parking lots, ramshackle buildings, elegant landscapes, and overall textural abstracts. But these are general art retreads, not exclusively “Rochester photography.”
And they are boring compared to Frank Petronio’s “Cristina, 2006,” the show’s stand-out work. Cristina is a 20-something, semi-nude, body-beautiful. She stands in a doorway (aha! The old doorway metaphor!) next to a television. On its screen is a full-face shot of Sally Fields. Sally, as any TV watcher knows, is advertising Boniva®, a drug to scare away osteoporosis, a major threat of aging. Poor Cristina. She doesn’t see the train coming, but just around the corner is the inevitable fall from perfection, nature’s dirty trick. Petronio manages to foretell the whole life cycle with one click of the camera.
Hey I’ll take it, blushing and all.
“Cristina, 2006” is one of two of my works in the Memorial Art Gallery’s “Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition. I made 30 x 40 inch inkjet prints for the show.
Reader Comments (add yours)
1. Hugh Alison — Aug 29 2007 04:17 PM
Hi Frank,
I follow your blog and Flickr fairly regularly. Congratulations, that must be a fantastic big print - makes me itch for large format again.
Some time I would be interested to read your methods for converting digital to BW - I like the tones you get,
Hugh