Melissa Catanese

Melissa Catanese plays with images as raw material, intuitively teasing out oblique and guttural interpretations, tapping the inexplicable and often dormant space within the surface of a photograph where meaning extends and recedes. Intentionally ambiguous, fractured, and strange, her subject matter gestures toward alienation as the dominant feature of modern society and is re-cast into carefully assembled sequences that sparkle with deep psychic longing, apocalyptic comedy, and provocative forms of beauty and violence. She is the author of Dive Dark Dream Slow, Voyagers, and The Lottery, among other artist's books. Her work was most recently included in Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape at Carnegie Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a Heinz Endowment Creative Development Award and has been shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Foam Paul Huf Award. Catanese contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), Photographers Looking At Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation (Pier 24, 2020), The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture, 2014) and to the project Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010), among other publications. Catanese is the cofounded of Spaces Corners, an artist-run project space centered on the photographic book, and she is a professor of photography and drawing at the University of Pittsburgh.