Richard Van Pelt is a documentary photographer. His work, his art, is deeply and sympathetically conjoined with our culture and its natural histories. He makes informed photographs from the home territories he has known and observed since early childhood. They are places not unlike places that many of us recognize or call home. His pictures are not exotic; simply recognize them.
Richard prints beautiful marks. As a craftsman there are few more discerning. His pictures might at first seem too plain and quiet. With further attention, one can find poised in them, connections, and rich possibility for relationship. It is the active participation between viewer and photograph that is the source of what pictures comes to mean. So meaning is, finally, unique and individual, and at the same time, broadly recognized and shared. But what is also important in his work, is the play of the content within his pictures – what they are about, and how the elements of his pictures express the ways of our world. Every 'thing' that happens in the world is expressed in the form of the world. Landscape is the expressed result of forces in the world. Look at these pictures and see what forces and values they express.
But the thing about Richard’s photographs, having looked at them now for some 35 years, is that they are always about the stuff of the world. His pictures reveal patterns of human expressions formed of the most common things of our public culture: houses, highways, cars and barbecues, and the endlessly changing display of stuff that flows through the landscapes of our lives. Richard's photographs show our common cultures as manifest designs within the stuff and detail of local neighborhoods and environments. His pictures are like a language of patterns: varied charts and maps of the scale, shape, and detail of human doings; those many curious ways in which we choose to reveal ourselves to the world.
It is from these ordinary places that he structures the forces of the world into pictures that are form-full, coherent, and intelligent. More importantly, find them renewing, and giving back of our world.
April 18, 2011
William S. Sutton, photographer | John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2015