LEO RUBINFIEN

Rubinfien became known in the early 1980s as one of the young American photographers working with the new color materials of the period, and his work was featured this year in the Cincinnati Museum of Art’s survey of that period, Starburst: Color Photography in America, 1970-1980. However, his interests were always international, and from the beginning of his career, each of his projects has developed as another approach to the phenomenon of globalization. As he states:

I have spent a lot of my life as a photographer exploring the great zone between countries that I sometimes call the “world city.” In Wounded Cities, I wrote,

“It often seemed to me as if I lived in a worldwide city, a vast lattice in which the cities of many countries were nodes, tied to each other with invisible threads — air routes, satellite links, undersea cables, shareholdings, mechanisms of credit, supply chains, crazes, all the obscure, innumerable bonds between individual people. Within that aggregation, it was not much harder to cross the world than to go from one side to another of any great metropolis …”

The world city is the place where you are when you cannot tell exactly where you are — the place where Buenos Aires, Dusseldorf and Hong Kong look more like each other than different. It is the place where Asia, Europe, Africa and America continually re-shape each other, each in its own image, and where people often tell me that they feel a freedom and exhilaration they don’t feel in the parochial, backwater towns of their native countries. And because it is full of their aspirations and longings, it is also a place where beauty and anxiety and sometimes even fear are all mixed up together.

In recent years, Rubinfien has worked in both color and black and white, developing an exquisite technique for varnishing his prints, and giving them the richness and beauty that were once looked for in dye transfer printing. The photographs have an intimacy, a richness and a global sweep that come together in the work of no other contemporary photographer.