Raven McCarter - Weekly Artist Post: Alex Riedlinger

'Alex Riedlinger is a photographer and music videographer based in Portland, OR. His work was most recently published in Fotografia Magazine and BathHouse Journal. He has worked with numerous Portland musicians shooting stills and video of live performance and portraits for promotional materials. His other Portland photographic work is documentary in nature, focusing on Black and African immigrant communities he belongs to as well as housing issues. In the past he has worked in newsprint as a photo editor and freelance photographer. Abroad, he has worked in Ethiopia and Nigeria to produce photographic series centering on music, dance and spirituality as well as issues of globalization and rural to urban migration. He has spent the past year and a half documenting Orisa communities and music in Seattle, WA and Nigeria, directing, shooting and editing a film called Children of the Sacred Elders.'

(Bio courtesy of Riedlinger's site)

As a woman of color I often face the reality that my education as a filmmaker very often lacks the representation of people like me. Though introduced to a wide variety of artists, course material has always been very (for the lack of a better word) white-washed; where even if the subject material depicts people of color the artist in most often simply traveling out of their own comfort zone in order to create a documentary series. Through my time as a growing filmmaker I have had to create my own foundation of 'minority' artists in which to become influenced by and this is why I have posted Riedlinger's series Just Like That. Alone the images are visually stimulating, that exude movement, and a the vibrancy of the culture but for me there is an added layer when I know that this is a subject matter that the artist has an integral cultural closeness to, as an individual who has a connection to African immigrant communities.

I'm impressed by the artist who can find context without going outside of themselves, without having to go outside of who they are as a person. No so much to mean that the artist's work isn't explorative because its very much so, but I see this series in particularly as a work of introspection just as much as I see it being documentary. But of course this is all subjective to my own impression of his work.

Check out his work:

www.alexriedlinger.com