My father, Frank Rampolla (1931–1971), was a figurative expressionist artist whose work examined the human condition: dignity, isolation, the scars of war, and the search for faith. Even when multiple figures shared the canvas, they rarely connected. That tension between presence and absence stayed with me.
Inspired by his legacy, I’ve continued to explore how easily we grow emotionally distant, even in a world built for constant contact. We all perform versions of ourselves, often without realizing it. Identity becomes a kind of habit, shaped by expectation and self-protection. Introspection is a portrait series about what lingers beneath that performance. It reveals a quieter kind of presence, shaped by solitude, memory, and the slow wear of time.
I’m drawn to the space between what someone shows and what they hold back. Texture that is etched, weathered, and worn becomes part of the subject, like time pressed into skin. The emotion isn’t declared. It’s carried.
These portraits don’t tell stories. They ask. What survives when the performance ends? What’s left after silence?
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.