Frank Petronio

Feb 6, 2009

Topic: Arts | Tags: , ,

w28_frank

Frank Petronio couldn’t be anything other than a photographer, and he has tried – role of husband, father, teacher, web designer. Almost as if he can’t escape the lure of an irreverent beauty. He’s abrupt, with a dark sense of humor and raw honesty that develops in uninhibited photographs.

He recently completed a project filled with amateur and alternative models posing idly in hotel rooms or kitchen corridors. Frank told me that his collection idea began when he realized that there was a whole market for “do it yourself modeling”, or girls who didn’t fit into the mainstream, agency world, and had numerous tattoos and piercings. Especially because sites like Suicide Girls, and many others, have become less about the quality of the image and more about the sleaze that fills the pages. Frank gave them a place to go to, someone who could understand that women aren’t perfect but they’re still amazing. “Every model, no matter how extroverted and confidently she presented herself, eventually confessed to anxiety over their self-image. This manifested itself in extreme ways – the expected anorexia and bulimia, but also with depression, self-mutilation (cutting), trichotillomania (hair-pulling), promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse.” Frank Petronio gave them a true to life photo.

While the tattooed pin-up model is no longer a fresh idea, Frank’s girls stay loyal to him. Many are been lucky enough to have catalogued years of their lives with Frank, at his home studio or on the beaches of Western New York. And he’s evolved; he photographs groups (still mostly women) in their element, and interacts with them, catching the substance that most photographers miss because they’re focused on the models left hand.

See his archived work.
Read a Korean Interview – if you can.

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