photo by Richard Rodriguez
Richard Rodriguez has always had an eye for design. I can remember being blown away by the sketchbooks he kept when we were in school; while mine were always messy and jumbled, with scraps of paper falling out and coffee stains covering half of the pages, Richard’s were always immaculately clean and full of bold, precise drawings, designs and photographs. He had a deceptively simple way of organizing things visually- his imagery was somehow striking yet subtle, offering up an unpretentious invitation to interpretation both at face value and somewhere much deeper, if one was inclined to look there.
Richard now lives and works in New York City. He’s done quite a bit of design work in recent years, all the while continuing to explore and refine his particular aesthetic. He’s always cited an affinity with musician and multi-media artist David Byrne, which I think is apparent in his work. Byrne has always seemed to be motivated by a kind of childlike curiosity and determination to seek out thoughtful ways of dealing with seemingly mundane subject matter, qualities which I’ve seen in Richard’s work time and time again.
Richard started blogging in 2005 as a way to organize his thoughts and ideas. He started a blog using blogger.com and “not knowing what it was”. Eventually he figured it out. Everyonesinlovewithyou.com has slowly evolved from a smattering of interesting links and internet ephemera into one of the most stunning photo blogs I’ve encountered.
Richard doesn’t have any particular subject matter- it’s more of a way of looking at things that binds his photos together. You can line up his pictures of a street fair, a hand-painted storefront sign, and the display case at a neighborhood bakery, and somehow they’re all identifiably similar. I think it’s this quality that reminds me of , pioneer of color photography. Eggleston, who had a background in painting, was known for taking photos that may have appeared, at first glance, somewhat haphazard. He photographed shoes under a bed, puddles during a rainstorm, lightbulbs, ceiling fans and broken down cars- and the “subject” was often cropped or located off-center. People accused Eggleston of shooting from the hip, when in reality his photographs were carefully composed, with much consideration given to color palettes and depth of field.
While not bound to a particular subject, Richard’s photos do succeed in conveying a sense of time and place when viewed together. Most of his photos are taken in and around New York, with special attention paid to details that would go unnoticed by most. A picture of the back of a girl’s head on the subway, a bunch of pink flowers on a median in Times Square, and silhouettes of dancers outdoors at night during a festival all contribute to the ever-evolving visual language that Richard uses to describe his surroundings. Some of his photos could be described as having a documentary style, but they are often accompanied or followed by an image that spins the literal back out into the universal and mysterious.
I’m not sure how much Richard even considers himself a “photographer,” as much as a collector and designer of visual information. While I look at his photos and see beautifully layered, complex compositions, I get the sense that Richard is more focused on building a kind of image-design library; an archive of the ways he has gone about arranging three-dimensional elements within a two-dimensional plane. I interviewed him in my kitchen recently, and we talked about this very thing. Rather than looking at his blog as the “finished product” or as the ultimate and final way to show his photos, Richard seems to be using his blog as more of a digital sketchbook. It’s constantly evolving and changing, with new images being added almost daily to build on the dialog with past images and to provide clues for what’s to come. While there are certain obvious limitations to viewing work on the internet, the fact that artists can use blogging as a platform to solve visual and conceptual problems within their own work seems to make up for it in spades. I think that’s really interesting.
Here Richard talks about blogging and photo adventures.
