I’m first and foremost a writer – poetry, later fiction and criticism. Although I collaborated with printmaker Bernard Solomon throughout the 1980s, it wasn’t until the digital revolution that I began to incorporate photography into my artistic vision – first street photos to help me work on a novel, then old family photos I "manipulated" to reflect my mood. My verbal skills numbed by 9-11, I roamed the city with a camera, trying to capture what I couldn’t put into words. It’s a process I’ve repeated several times since, attempting at crucial, speechless moments to bring my world into focus.

Before I began walking the streets with a camera, I never considered myself a "Political" artist. But once I began to isolate moments with the camera, my social consciousness also developed. The photos exhibited here are part of the "My Citi" photos, digitally manipulated images juxtaposing Citibank’s purposely ambiguous "live richly" advertisements that crowd the streets of major cities with the homeless who also populate those streets.

Rochelle Ratner