PORTFOLIO

PHOTOGRAPH BY RICARDO BARROS

THIS IS MY PORTRAIT of Joseph Acquah, a sculptor, that consists of three photographs. I photographed the (human) sculptor facing right. I photographed the sculptor’s self-portrait in bronze facing left. And both of these I placed into a third, silhouetted photograph of the sculptor’s bronze self-portrait. For me, this photograph is about introspection, and about the impossibility of truly comprehending certain things. One can either see the two faces, or the silhouetted artwork, but not both at the same time. This challenge to our understanding is but one of the many contradictions artists grow to live comfortably with.

Ricardo Barros is a professional photographer working in the Philadelphia region. Ricardo is the author of Facing Sculpture: A Portfolio of Portraits, Sculpture and Related Ideas. His photographs are in the permanent collections of eleven museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was awarded a Fellowship in Photography by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 1984 and 2021.