David Reinfeld: Composite Realities

David Reinfeld’s Composite Realities embraces the art in architecture and the surrounding environment. Throughout photographic history, the capturing of buildings, streets, and cityscapes has been a ubiquitous fodder for artists and photographers. 

The depiction of buildings, in part or as a whole, has always been closely entwined with photography. The very earliest photograph known, Untitled (Point de Vue, 1827), a Heliograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce of France, was taken from a room looking out over nearby buildings and rooftops. Architectural compositions were easy subjects for the early low technology cameras since a building would not move or shake. French Photographer, Eugène Atget (1857-1927) literally walked the streets of Paris to document and visually preserve buildings and parts of the city that were systematically being replaced. As time progressed, photographers became more adventuresome, climbing up buildings under construction to capture dramatic views or aerial backdrops. Artists appreciated not only the whole of a building, but also each its parts, celebrating the artistry of a window, door, wall, and roof line.

In Reinfeld’s visual exploration, his compositions leverage shape, structure, leading lines, angles, and pattern accentuated by light and shadow. While at RISD, his “eye” was shaped by the Constructivism and Bauhaus art movements where art and architecture found common ground. Constructivism was abstract, used space and shape to reflect modern industrial society and urban space. The Bauhaus movement embraced this Constructivist interest in industrial materials, geometric forms like the triangle, square, and circle and asymmetry as a rejection of earlier decorative and naturalistic movements. Abstractionist movements then followed. Reinfeld worked his feelings for the city into constructed and unconstructed image creation. His photography spans the literal, interpretive, and abstract unified by a focus on his life within New York City.

The architecture-based abstractions by Reinfeld in the exhibition Composite Realities are in three separate bodies of work: Reliance (steel girders), Confines (brick painted surfaces) and Schrödinger’s Cat (the glass sides of buildings). On his background, Reinfeld comments: “I had the privilege of studying with Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Lisette Model, and Minor White when I went to RISD in 1973 for an MFA in Photography. I was an untrained artist, with no formal education. Essentially, I was a New York City street photographer with the idealism of the 60s. Having a scientific education, I was able to learn the technical aspects of photography, along with the social and political nature of the times. At RISD, everything changed. I was exposed to aestheticism for the first time and how the construction of an image was an essential part of expressing myself through the photographic medium. Harry and Aaron were consummate artists with seemingly different approaches. Taken together, they taught me different ways to approach image making. Harry was a realist and romantic, whereas Aaron saw the world abstractly. As Harry would say to Aaron (paraphrased), ‘When I photograph a wall, it’s a wall. But when you photograph a wall, it’s something else.' I tended to see more abstractly like Aaron, yet think more philosophically like Lisette. Harry introduced to me that the ordinary things we see are the most extraordinary.“

In Composite Realities, Reinfeld is an urban documentarian with a twist. As a New Yorker, he finds no shortage of intriguing visual content around him in his daily life: layered scrapes of posters on walls, painted surfaces, windows and mammoth steel fabrications and frames rising from the concrete. His images are both non-constructed and constructed, as he experiments with reflecting the constant change and impermanence of urban life. While his images are not documentary in a traditional sense, they are a celebration of the color and excitement, the chaos, change, and presence of the city at this moment in time. These are the works of one photographer carrying forward prior decades of thought on expression in art, infused with his own contemporary experience, to become these “composite realities.” Not merely visual composites, Reinfeld’s creations are composites of decades of inspirations and influences, the history of photography and the history of the city, folded and shaped into each final image like a record of time and space.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in New York City, David Reinfeld began his photographic career in the ‘60s in NYC honing skills as a street photographer, taking pictures and protesting. Early in his career, he documented the signs of our times and taught photography at the Public Theatre to inner city children. This period was his “coming of age;” photography became his first love, and it would last forever.

In the early ’70s, Reinfeld received his MFA in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, studying under photographers such as Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Lisette Model, and Minor White. Siskind taught Reinfeld that photography was much more than the content we see. Influenced by the experimental nature of art during this period, Reinfeld began looking for and creating abstraction in his images. He photographed graffiti and decayed walls anywhere he could find them. With the emergence of digital photography and other tools, he discovered composite photography. Today, Reinfeld continues to test abstraction in imagery. For him, art is not only an arrangement of form and content, but an awareness of visual impact and communication. What makes a picture come alive? Why do some photographs remain in our consciousness, while others fall away? These are the questions Reinfeld asks, as a photographer, in a world where the boundaries of well-crafted commercialism and fine art have blurred.

Reinfeld still lives and works in New York City, where he grew up embracing, supporting, and working in the visual arts.