Mortal
"Mortal" was exhibited at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, New York from September 4 through October 4, 2020, in the gallery's 1910 carriage house.
"Mortal" (https://pamelasalisburygallery.com/exhibition/robert-palumbo/) included over 50 works across three floors, organized as a loosely chronological 20-year narrative.
"Mortal" considers mortality throughf five bodies of my work:
•LOST VEGAS. Shot in Vegas between 1990 and 2002, featuring the denizens of "the most American city," fighting to make it on and off the Strip.
•BALTIMORE HOMICIDE. Shot while embedded within the Baltimore Homicide Unit for the New York Times as they investigated murders in the fall of 2000.
•9/11. Photographs taken on and just after 9/11/01 in Lower Manhattan, where I lived.
•RWANDA GACACA. Portraits and reportage at the gacaca (meeting in the grass) public genocide hearings in Rwanda in 2003, in which the families of the victims of the 1994 genocide confronted the genocidaires who murdered their loved ones. If the genocidaires admitted their guilt and apologized, they were set free in a grand experiment of reconciliation and forgiveness.
•GLACIERS VS. CARBON. The earth itself is a mortal being in crisis. Nowhere is that more evident than in the glaciers that serve as levees of ice against the rising temperatures that threaten their, and by proxy, our existence. I photographed the carbon-scarred glaciers of Alaska, capturing the pollution-caused damage that appears like scar tissue on a human body.