DAVID UZZARDI BALANCES THE ROUGH TIDE OF THE PROSAIC AND THE SUBLIME
Critic and poet Rush Rankin once told me: “Every effective poem has to maintain a state of tension between assertion and humility, the mundane and the grand, the specific and the general, the explicit and the suggestive.” It seems that David Uzzardi has achieved this and more in his humble images, effortlessly limning the dimensions of the ineffable mystery by focusing on the downtrodden, the outcast, the eternally disenfranchised. However, he has not expressed the human condition in a didactic or saccharine manner, but instead has chosen the path of the wandering urban mendicant, snapping photos from the heart while travelling more than six times across the continental United States. This work is completely lacking in artifice or irony and makes no specific claims, yet it is brimming with empathy and longing. Here’s an excerpt from his artist statement:
My photographs of people shopping, waiting, hurting, concentrating, smiling and etc. are all part of my never-ending passion to find harmony between people and their environment. This harmony that I strive to illuminate is not always positive. It is sometimes a struggle for harmony, and even a harmony with the unpleasant. Regardless of its degree, this harmony represents an existence, a real life, an emotion. My images seek to emphasize the small details and nuances of people in order to capture something much more elusive and transcendent then what appears to be merely everyday life.
