• FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2022 (San Antonio, Texas)

ED MALCIK (Austin, TX)
The Horizontal Priest – Recent Photos From Italy
Mockingbird Handprints Blue Star
1420 South Alamo Street, Suite 112A, San Antonio, TX 78210
(210) 878-5711 | mockingbirdhandprints@gmail.com | https://www.mockingbirdhandprints.com
Opening reception: Thursday, September 1, 2022, 6 – 8:30 pm, and Friday, September 2, 2022, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibit on display: September 1 – October 2, 2022
Viewing hours: Thu – Sun, 11 am – 5 pm
Contact: Jane Bishop (210) 262-6698 | mockingbirdhandprints@gmail.com
Artist talk: Sunday, September 18, 2022, 4 pm, at Mockingbird Handprints Blue Star
Free and open to the public

Ed Malcik studied photojournalism at the University of Texas and worked as a staff photographer at Texas newspapers, including five years at The Austin American-Statesman. He freelanced for the wire services and publications such as Cosmopolitan, Us, Texas Monthly, and The New York Times. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, and as a Foreign Service Officer at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. He returned to photography and worked on photographic projects in Paris 2010-12 and Chennai, India, 2013-15. He now lives in Austin where he photographs on the street in a documentary style. His work has been exhibited in Europe, India, and the United States, and is in the Wittliff Collections.

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I am a documentary photographer. My artistic practice is to wander urban areas looking for situations that tweak my interest and photograph them. I find the real world more fascinating than fiction, such an odd and humorous place that I don’t need Photoshop to enhance it. I generally work in public places without a preconceived idea as to subject, guided by what I see. I like to show people within an environment, and for this exhibition the environment is Italy, and the people, more often than not, are tourists. At least I think they are tourists because they gathered around tourist destinations, but while there was a time years ago when I could separate tourists from locals by their clothes and actions, that is no longer possible: nations of the world have united under Adidas and Chanel, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga.

I spent several months this year in Sicily, Capri, the Amalfi coast, Rome, Siena, and Florence. I hadn’t been to Italy in years and was curious to see what had changed. Not much, actually. Italy seems to measure time more in decades than years, and Italy looks old because it is. Italians are aggressive in maintaining their centuries-old pageantry involving medieval costumes, and not as a tourist attraction but for themselves; tourists are invited to watch but not touch. In particular, variations of the Palio horse race take place in town squares all over Italy. The Catholic religion has a high visual presence, with priests, nuns, and churches seemingly on every corner. On the streets and public places where I photograph, the past was more visible than the new, and the famous fashion, design, and technology that the country is known for was behind doors. I never saw a Ferrari. Also behind doors was any evidence of Italy’s difficulties with Covid, changes in national government, and economic fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is not so far away.

I traveled by plane, ferry, car, bus, train, and foot, always by foot, relying on good footwear while gathering 25,000 steps a day. This series of images is what I found visually interesting except for the 11 days I had to quarantine with some new variant of Covid.

This exhibition is my fifth at Mockingbird Handprints Gallery during Fotoseptiembre, each time documenting an urban location. Previous exhibitions focused on San Antonio, Austin, New York, and, last year, Paris. All prints are made to the highest archival standards by me in my studio on an Epson Stylus-Pro 3880 printer with Epson Ultra-Chrome K3 ink on Epson Ultra-Premium Presentation Paper Matte, and framed with acid-free mats in aluminum frames with acrylic glazing.