Introspection
My father, Frank Rampolla (1931–1971), was a figurative expressionist artist who painted with raw honesty. His canvases spoke of dignity amid isolation. Even when a scene was crowded with figures, their gazes rarely met. Presence and absence lived side by side in that silence.
These works move through the same silence. Masks form quietly, identities bend under expectation and protection. I listen for what solitude, memory, and time leave behind.
More than fifty years ago, loss entered my life, and with it, the quiet began. I tried to understand what was missing by studying what remained. That became my way of seeing. My practice is about waiting for small signals, when trust flickers and persona slips, and something unguarded appears.
What remains is the self beneath the performance. It’s the quiet that endures when the act is over.
Dignity sits in conversation with Introspection, even though their subjects differ. Where Introspection turns inward, shaped by personal reflection and the silence of absence, Dignity faces outward toward strangers met on city streets, each carrying their own story. But both series circle the same terrain: the emotional architecture of being human.
In Dignity, I traveled across the United States making portraits of people I met in public spaces. Most were unhoused, and others were simply passing through. What struck me wasn’t just the harshness of circumstance, but the emotional weight beneath the surface: regret, joy, fear, hope, and a hunger for connection. These portraits don’t document environments. They confront the viewer with presence, eye to eye.
Like Introspection, this work is not about answers. It’s about the quiet reckoning that happens when we slow down long enough to really see another person and, in doing so, see ourselves. What we share goes deeper than appearances. It touches something elemental: our need for recognition, for belonging, for love. That’s the heart of both series.
Echoes of Light sits between Dignity and Introspection. The people are gone, but their emotional weight lingers. These images explore light, tone, and form not as subjects to be viewed but as sensations to be felt. Each photograph captures a moment when atmosphere becomes presence and memory shifts into something more immediate: mood, texture, light.
The landscapes are untethered from time and place. They exist as emotional terrain—quiet, abstract, alive. Like Monet and Turner, the work softens the edges of the visible world, allowing form to dissolve into light. Like Zao Wou-Ki, it sometimes lets go of form entirely, trusting the viewer to feel rather than define.
If Dignity asks us to witness others and Introspection asks us to witness ourselves, Echoes of Light asks us to simply feel. It lingers in that uncertain space between presence and absence. What remains is not a figure or a story, but light, air, and the feeling they carry.
Kairos picks up the emotional current running through Dignity, Echoes of Light, and Introspection, but turns toward the moment of transformation. Where Dignity centers on presence and Introspection explores interiority, Kairos enters the charged space before change. It's the threshold where form, feeling, and time begin to dissolve into something elemental.
Fluid shapes move across textured surfaces like thought made visible. The series doesn’t aim to represent the world but to distill it. Influenced by Kandinsky’s belief that abstraction can reveal deeper truth, Kairos searches for rhythm and motion beneath perception.
This is not a place of clarity. It’s where things stir quietly, just before they become. The viewer is invited into that space—unfixed, imperfect, and alive.
Sanctuary offers a return. After the human presence of Dignity, the dissolving forms of Echoes of Light, the internal searching of Introspection, and the unsettled threshold of Kairos, this series moves into stillness. It turns toward the natural world, not as an escape but as a way back to something essential.
In a world that often asks us to perform and prove ourselves, nature asks nothing. It allows. For me, it is a place of clarity, a space where the noise quiets. It connects me to those who walked before and steadies me in the present.
These images are not about documenting landscape. They are about feeling it. They reflect what happens internally when I am immersed in the wild. My own edges begin to soften. Stillness becomes a kind of knowing. This is where I go to realign. These photographs are a trace of that experience.