October 1 – 27, 1990
Gerard Albanese (b. 1942, Brooklyn, NY d. 2011 Fayetteville, Arkansas) was a landscape architect in New York who became a photographer after seeing Diane Arbus’ 1967 photograph of identical twins. Albanese studied with Diane Arbus shortly before her death in 1971 and later studied with Arbus’ teacher, Lisettte Model. Albanese moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1977, first to Lopez Island and in the early Eighties, to Seattle’s Belltown, where he photographed on the streets of the city. For most of the Eighties he photographed the homeless in an area along First and Second Avenues, which has since been gentrified. After the building he lived in in Seattle collapsed, he moved to Portland where he extensively photographed at the world-famous Burnside Skatepark during the first half of the Nineties.
Gerard died without leaving a final edit for this series, but he left boxes of 11×14” prints. We have included here all the images from this series that we have his 11×14” prints of.
“His tight expressionistic black and white photoessays investigated the relationship between the urban environment and the people who move through it…Albanese sees humanity as something other than the reclamation of the old aura-filled notion of human dignity. Instead, he views it as a native refusal to conform to the tenets of one’s environment, a spontaneous and wily perversity of spirit.” (Artforum, Summer 1989).
Gerard Albanese exhibited at the William Traver Gallery in Seattle, WA, at Blue Sky, and at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, in Portland, OR. His work is included in the exhibition catalog Seattle Now by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, BC, Canada (1984), and his work was published in Art in America (September 1988). He was the recipient of a Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship Award (1991). In late 1995, Albanese left the Pacific Northwest and moved to a homestead in Kingston, Arkansas where he practiced photography, drawing, and tending the land.