Walking the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, Murray creates a hauntingly beautiful narrative book that navigates the psychology of men through an exploration of portraiture and place. Intimate portraits and enigmatic landscapes deliberately mix fact and fiction, past and present, myth and reality.
Katie Murray is an American photographer and video artist. She received her BFA in 1997 from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2000. Murray’s work concerns itself with the primal and mythological. She has exhibited in solo and group shows to include: [The Barbara Walter’s Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College (2014), The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2014) The Photographers’ Gallery, UK (2013) College of the Canyons Art Gallery (2012), HomeFront Gallery, NY (2011), World Class Boxing, Miami (2010), Kate Werble Gallery, NY (2009), International Center for Photography (2008) White Columns, NY (2004) Jen Bekman Gallery (2004), Queens Museum of Art, NY (2004), and The Yale Art Gallery, CT (2000)]. She received the New York State Residents Grant for Excellence in Photography in 1996, the Robin Forbes Memorial Award in Photography in 1997, the Barry Cohen Award for Excellence in Art in 2000, and a NYFA grant in 2012. Murray’s work has been published in various magazines, books and catalogues. Murray’s work is held in numerous private and public collections. Murray is a faculty member at Hunter College, Sarah Lawrence College, and School of Visual Arts.
Maria Antonella Pelizzari teaches courses in the History of Photography at Hunter College, focusing on issues of cultural representation, historiography, and collecting, for both nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. Her expertise covers a wide range of subjects and time periods, such as Italian photography and culture from its beginnings to the present, nineteenth-century British colonialism, American modernism, and the interdisciplinary dialogue between photography and architecture.
She is the author of Photography and Italy (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), a historical study that represents the first and only book on this subject in English literature, which will be also published by Contrasto, Milan. She has edited the volume Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, CCA and Yale Center for British Art, 2003 (awarded the book prize Historians of British Art” in 2004) and has contributed essays to several books (among them, Art for Venice, London: Ivorypress, 2011; Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani 1978-2008, University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2010; Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London and New York: I. B.Tauris, 2002; America: The New World in 19th- Century Painting, Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 1999). Her essays have been published in History of Photography, Visual Resources, Afterimage, Performing Arts Journal, Casabella, Fotologia, Photography and Culture, Perspectives. Actualités de la recherche en histoire de l’art, and CV Magazine. She has co-edited (with Paolo Scrivano, Boston University) a new volume of Visual Resources. An International Journal of Documentation on Intersection of Photography and Architecture” (Vol.XXVII, N.2, June 2011) and is working on a new book on photomontage in Italy in the 1930s.
Pelizzari earned her PhD from the University of New Mexico and her MA from the Universita’ di Genova, in Italy. She has been Associate Curator of Photography at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, and has held teaching positions at Concordia University (Montreal) and Ryerson University (Toronto).
Text by: Maria Antonella Pelizzari
