Exposure: Mick Ricereto

City of Color

All photos ©Mick Ricereto. All rights reserved.

"This series of photographs explores the color and surprising beauty I have found wandering the urban landscape. Many of these views were born by chance notice in my peripheral vision; the striking light pouring through the stanchions of the 95 bridge, the shadowy reflection of the PNI tower in a rusty Chinatown dry cleaning shop window, the brilliant yellow oxidized paint of a Tacony forklift left outside to rust. The city environment is rich with chance encounters and fleeting compositions of fascinating color and textures. I have been taking urban environmental photographs since my arrival in Philadelphia in 1987. Graduating from Spring Garden College with a BA in Interior Design in 1992, I am now with Kohler Co.’s Robern division in Bristol, after many years as Design Director at SieMatic Corp., a German kitchen cabinet company in Bensalem. I have always strived for a synergy between art and design — to bring elements of my street-level inspiration to my professional industrial design work. I was a regular exhibitor and co-curator of the Vertigo Members Gallery in Old City from 1998 to 1999. A combination of my connection between interior design and photography can be seen on www.domicilemodern.com, which marked my first foray into digital photography. Other showings include Stolen and the Visual Fringe 1999 with Dissentia Curatorial Services, and member exhibitions at the Monmouth County Art Alliance in NJ from 1996–1998. Articles of my interior design work have been published in Home and Saveur magazines."

Technical: These shots were all taken on Minolta 35mm equipment on 100-speed film, with wide apertures ranging from f3.5–5.6. All of these shots were taken during the late fall between 3 and 5 p.m., when the sky is a brilliant blue and the long sun casts a rich glow on the subject. I scan the prints into the Macintosh and use Photoshop for color correction only, with the exception of the Tacony warehouse, which I boosted the contrast to emphasize the amazingly blue sky.

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