The influence and legacy of an early career as a fashion and portrait photographer is striking in the work of Priscilla Rattazzi. As the consummate master of restraint, she conjures an innately and effortlessly elegant aesthetic of beauty; whether she’s portraying the rarefied, aspirational worlds of the Great and the Good, or her beloved, sentinel lime trees etched against a snowy landscape in the place that was once called home. Rattazzi’s talent is to imbue her portraits with a singular stillness that anchors them and gives them the potency and permanence of a statue.
Her landscapes, conversely, are remarkable for their anthropomorphic animation. Rattazzi is not the first photographer to go into the desert in search of meaning and miracle, to seek out landscapes as a source of inspiration, solace and peace. Like Ansel Adams, Robert Misrach, or Sebastiao Salgado who pursued the beauty aesthetic in nature’s empty spaces, she became an environmentalist by default. Her 2017 Grand Staircase-Escalante series is a clarion call to save this fragile, inaccessible land mass in South Utah. This, the last explored frontier of America, offers an astounding biodiversity, from its low-lying deserts, its coniferous forest to the uncharted cliffs and escarpments of its mountain range.
Rattazzi’s method of making sense of the unwieldy barren landscape and its threatened existence is to give it a human scale and perspective, which inevitably deepens our sense of engagement. She positions the otherworldly geological wonders – those towering basalt sandstone rock stacks – centre frame, and angles the lens so they look, for all the world, like wasp-waisted, ample-breasted figures of an Irving Penn fashion shoot, posing beneath the brims of their ladylike hats.
Priscilla Rattazzi was born in Rome, Italy in 1956 and went to boarding school in Wales before moving to the United States in the early seventies. She studied photography at Sarah Lawrence College, and later worked as an assistant to photographer Hiro in the late seventies. Throughout the eighties, Priscilla worked as a fashion and portrait photographer in New York. After her children were born, her focus shifted to more personal subjects, such as family life and dogs; most recently she has gravitated towards the environment. Her work has appeared in Brides, Self, Redbook, New York and The New York Times Magazine. In Italy, her work has appeared in Vogue Italia, Donna and Amica. Rattazzi has published four books and one portfolio: Best Friends (1989), Children (1992), Georgica Pond (2000), Best Friends The Portfolio (2006), Luna & Lola (2010), and Three Lindens (2023). She has shown at galleries and museums such as Staley-Wise Gallery in New York, the Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, TN, Glenn Horowitz Bookselller in East Hampton, NY, Jack Banning Gallery in New York, Valentina Moncada Gallery in Rome, Italy, Paul Fisher Gallery in West Palm Beach, FL, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL, the Peter Marino Art Foundation in Southhampton, NY, the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, and Robilant+Voena Gallery in Milan, Italy.