RIVER | KRISTINA LOGGIA: AT MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY WEST

26 Sep - 24 Nov 2024

RIVER
Kristina Loggia
RIVER presents a series of twelve photographs, captured with a medium format film camera at the Snake River Bridge and surrounding area, known as Emily's Pond Levee. These photographs tell a story of isolation and connectedness, integral human experiences amplified by a time of uncertainty. With the iconic Teton range as her backdrop—Loggia’s home for many years—she was drawn to document the characters who buzzed about Emily’s Pond, a popular recreational and meeting place for the inhabitants of Jackson Hole. Loggia captured both the interpersonal and the solitary, the active and the idle moments of strangers, each interwoven by the shared experience of the pandemic. The result of her quietly discerning and meditative eye is a bewitchingly captured discourse on the tension of that time in the face of humans’ elemental longing for connection- be it with others or to the sublime natural landscape.
Loggia writes about the project: “RIVER is a project I made during the coronavirus pandemic. I left New York City on March 15th, 2020, thinking I would be in Wyoming for two weeks. However, as isolation continued for nearly a year, I ended up staying much longer. In Jackson, I was able to take walks while always keeping a distance from others. I often walked by the Snake River near Emily’s Pond and as I did, I became captivated by the people I observed, and my sense that they seemed to be looking for the same things I was: a connection to the landscape of the place and the landscape of the new social reality in which we found ourselves, a connection that felt more and more and more elusive as the pandemic wore on. The images in this series, taken with a medium format camera, capture the unease I felt and saw around me. A woman sits by a pond seeming to be in a meditative position, yet she seems preoccupied with her phone. A group of young people keep their distance forming a human triangle. A man swims downstream and seems almost lost in the river's current. All these images are expressions of the tension not only between people and space but also in the spaces between people.”
Kristina Loggia’s photography practice is marked by a deep understanding and reverence of the subjects she captures, blending personal history with broader cultural narratives. Loggia's approach to portrait photography is influenced by her childhood admiration for photographers like Harry Callahan, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White. She believes that every aspect of what she captures holds importance to contextualizing her subject, a philosophy that guides her work. “No space is just a ‘space’, no object just an ‘object’. Everything has a history and holds meaning,” Loggia says about her approach to photography. Whether capturing celebrities or everyday individuals, in a world that is inundated with perfunctory images, Loggia’s work conveys an inherent honesty and authenticity.
Loggia's early career in Los Angeles involved photographing actors' headshots, but she soon transitioned to portrait photography, learning the technical aspects from her peers. This shift allowed her to develop a strong portfolio, leading to opportunities with publicists and magazine editors. In 2001, Loggia embarked on a significant project, "Apron Chronicles: A Patchwork of American Recollections," which began while she was finishing a two-year journey photographing young women in rodeo pageantry. Collaborating with freelance writer EllynAnne Giesel, Loggia photographed women with personal connections to aprons, capturing diverse subjects such as a 111-year-old mother, a Holocaust survivor, and a biology professor from Mali. This project, comprising 46 environmental portraits and accompanying stories, has become nationally recognized as a nostalgic and thought-provoking traveling exhibition, exhibited at the Women's Museum in Dallas TX, Channing peak Gallery in Santa Barbara, CA, AND the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, PA, among others.
Born and raised in New York City, Loggia graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Initially following her family's tradition in acting, she studied at the Stella Adler Conservatory in both New York City and Los Angeles. A lecture by Ed Asner about the war in El Salvador ignited a childhood dream of becoming a war photographer. This inspiration led her to El Salvador with the Witness to Peace Program, where she discovered her passion for capturing truth through the lens of a camera. Her work has been featured in numerous magazines and news networks, including Time Magazine, The New Yorker, SPIN, Detour, ESPN, Fortune, Telegraph UK, CBS Sunday Morning, NPR’s All Things Considered, and The New York Times, among others. Her work has been shown across the United States in galleries and museums and is a part of several prominent private collections.