NYAB Event - Ron Diorio “Better Days & Come Play With Me”

Ron Diorio “Better Days & Come Play With Me”

Site 109

This event has ended.

Better Days is a series of twenty-three photographs taken over a ten-year period in an array of locations including New York City, London and Delhi. Diorio photographs with a cellphone camera. However, unlike the ubiquitous cellphone pictures that we’ve all become accustomed to, Diorio is working with one of the earliest model phones that featured a camera. Whereas most cellphone cameras today take pictures with 8.0 (or more) pixels, Diorio uses a camera that only records 0.3 pixels. He then redacts information from the photographs, reducing them to impressionistic, almost painterly, glimpses of everyday life.

The photo series Come Play With Me is inspired by a paper published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior on “Why Humans Have Sex.” The paper details a research project in which participants were asked to indicate which items in a list of 238 ‘reasons’ led them to have sex. Diorio posted personal ads on Craigslist using selected reasons to to have sex from the study as the headline or subject. He then worked with the images sent in response to these ads to form the basis of the series. Diorio explains that the particulars of creating the sourced images are the same as those of his lens-based work. “I try to find the part or moment in a picture that interests me. Through digital editing, I work on eliminating everything extraneous in order to convey something universal.”