Right under your nose there might be something that you’re not familiar with. Maybe taking pictures is an opportunity to make someone look again.
Artist Christine Osinski recently rediscovered a series of large format pictures initially shot in the 1980’s, exploring life and culture in Staten Island, « The Forgotten Borough ».
In the early eighties, Osinski was looking for a cheap place to rent with her husband. She found herself in Staten island, a place she could easily relate to growing up on the South Side of Chicago in a working class neighborhood. In 1983 and 1984, attracted by the quirkiness of the place and this working class sensibility, she began photographing the island she was now living on. "There were a lot of people outside, people having block parties, at parades and kids hanging out. People were very curious and having the 4×5 camera on a tripod helped me. It was just nice being outside and meeting people. You just never knew what was going to happen. It was an adventure.”
Throughout portraits of strangers on South Beach and everyday scenes of working class neighborhood in suburban homes, Osinski captured her own understanding of the middle class culture with an uncoated Linhoff lens on a 4x5 camera and a tripod. She says: "A lot of my work is about the familiar so that it begins to take on a more unusual presence. It makes you question your assumptions about things you know. Right under your nose there might be something that you’re not familiar with. Maybe taking pictures is an opportunity to make someone look again."
At the time, although obsessed by the project, Osinski realized she could not print her pictures properly. Many years later, as a professor of art at Copper Union, she understood the digital scanning process could finally achieve the quality she had always wanted for her work. Out in February 2016, her book Summer Days: Staten Island is a record of life stories and an intimate monochrome exploration of this « Forgotten Borough ».
