Phyllis Galembo at Sepia International

Since the mid-1980s, Phyllis Galembo has produced an impressive body of photographs documenting the physical character, costumery and rituals of African religious practices and their diasporic manifestations in the Caribbean and South America. Using a direct, unaffected portrait style, Galembo captures her subjects informally posed but often strikingly attired in elaborate colored robes, spectacularly decorative fabrics, and spooky masks and makeup. Galembo's subjects level a penetrating gaze at a photographic interpreter who has managed to collapse, for a moment, the cultural, racial and economic distance between herself and them.

The 32 photographs in this show ranged from images of participants in the Haitian Carnival to priests, priestesses, and religious fetishes and shrines in Brazil and Nigeria. Galembo's photos establish an individual link, albeit fleeting and entirely esthetic, between the viewer and the otherworldly visual pleasure of her utterly distinctive subjects. In the most striking image, taken during Carnival (2004), three young boys--one standing in the foreground, one leaning against a graffiti-covered wall and another squatting on the right--are splattered in thick, rich red and green pigment, their eyes locked on the camera in a tableau of ethnic color, social mystery and a powerful sense of personal identity. The narrative title of another numinous photo (1995) tells us that the square hole in the floor in which a Haitian servitor is standing is a very sacred place; he is wearing a fedora and yellow shirt, with a ceremonial cup and a bottle arranged in front of him and an extraordinary deep turquoise wall behind. Galembo's photos combine a careful, almost ethnographic observation with a deep sense of mystical wonder and a palpable personal connection with the people that she photographs.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group