Joseph Vitone

Color Notes on a Wide Field

February 7, 2008 - March 2, 2008

Joseph Vitone’s photographs of China, Color Notes on a Wide Field, often have a cinematic quality—an unfolding of events readable in the choreography of the people in both urban and rural areas. The long frame provides the perfect field for unfolding of interactions between the portrait subjects surrounded by their day-to-day activities. The streets of urban China are dense with life and commerce. The cadence of rural life continues largely unchanged from a countryside many generations past. The scenes are presented in such a way as to eschew exoticism, and present an understanding of the places and characters, making them approachable and knowable -- citizens of a country whose density of population and long history of rural lifestyle have engendered a an ease with the lack of personal space and an acceptance of other people as members of a great extended family.