Roger Mastroianni’s Long View of cleveland
Recent poetic images by a master photographer
ON VIEW TO NOVEMBER 10, 2021
Cleveland—an emphatic silent subject unfazed by the imposition of a pandemic—posed again before Roger Mastroianni’s lens. Roger is a master photographer whose precision eye has inspected and interpreted our city for decades. He capitalized on the impact of Covid-19 by contemplating a uniquely quiet Northeast Ohio. “When the pandemic shut down the city every shoot I had on my schedule was cancelled,” Roger explains. “The entertainment industry was hit especially hard and it would be 400 days before one of my favorite clients, the Cleveland Orchestra, would perform in front of a live audience. With this free time, I began to document the empty city using my Phase One XT technical camera which makes 200-700 individual exposures over a 2-7 minute period and averages them together into a single raw image.” These state-of-the-art long exposure images reveal the strange pandemic calm and lonely grandeur of the city’s landmarks, curves, lines, shadows and edges juxtaposed with the ineluctable movement and painterly celebration of Cleveland’s skies and water.
