About

Brooklyn born Lou Spitalnick (1937) attended art classes at The Brooklyn Museum.  His absorption in photography only began in the early 1980s  after a long stint as art critic on The New Haven Register.  From the beginning he took a deep interest in alternative and vintage printing processes, studying with masters like Lois Conner (platinum/palladium), Lothar Osterburg (photogravure) and Sandy King (carbon) and eventually exhibiting his work in numerous galleries around the country, from Santa Fe to Palm Beach to Manhattan, but especially those on Long Island’s East End, where he has made his home for the past 50 years. The work of his early years focused on still life and florals, but subsequently portraiture became his primary pursuit.  Lou has shown at The Marlborough Gallery and his work is in various public collections, including that of The Hartford Atheneum and The New Orleans Museum of Art.

Artist Statement

My photographs of both people and still life’s are meant to emulate the works of art of the old masters I have always revered. I aspire to capture the essence of people at their most intensely present. I am interested in the living human face and I seek to reveal a psychological truth about the individual subject. There is a dichotomy between what people want to reveal about themselves and the Inclination to hide and transform the self into an “other”. 

However, one aspect of my portrait work has to do with the way people conceal their identities or disguise themselves to avoid personal revelations. On the other hand, disguises reveal secrets as much as they hide them, and my tattooed faces, for example, show people broadcasting clues about themselves in  the symbols and designs they chose.

Still Life work is about the formality that can be achieved in a picture solely with objects in their juxtaposition and arrangement, but it is also about the way objects figure in our perception of, and relationship to, the external world.