Christopher Postlewaite works from Philadelphia, photographing his spouse, his friends, his neighbours, and the city itself — pictures staged and observed at once, made inside a tight social radius.
What the work refuses to do is separate the documentary from the constructed. Postlewaite makes pictures in collaboration with people he knows — spouse, friends, friends of friends — alongside the city that surrounds them. The Philadelphia he photographs is the one a few blocks from home: a neighbour's dog, the empty corner store, a puddle, a bar that burned down, a former strip club. Place and people share equal billing.
On the work, Postlewaite writes: “My work is centered around my experience of living in Philadelphia and mediates photographs made in collaboration with my spouse, friends and friends of friends, in harmony with pictures that describe my new neighbour’s dog, the empty corner store, a members only after-hours bar called Foto Club that burned down this April, a letterboard as group portrait in a former strip club called Cousin Danny’s and a transcendent puddle two blocks from my home in South Philadelphia… I’m interested in my work like that of a photobooth—as a space where performance and self-presentation dovetail, where fictions, realities and adhoc patinas orbit as one.”
Postlewaite is a photographer and musician based in Philadelphia. He holds a BA and BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. The work he selected for this feature lives between staged and observational: pictures of place, subculture, and self-presentation, made inside his immediate social circle.
