Richard Max Gavrich (b. 1992, San Francisco) is a photographer, writer and educator.
His first monograph, Estraneo, published in 2015 by Edizioni del Bradipo, charted the Lowlands of Emilia-Romagna. He has exhibited at the Museo San Rocco (Fusignano, Italy), the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), Rayko Gallery (San Francisco), and lectured at Big Class New Orleans and Bard College, among others.
He is a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at Crosstown Arts in Memphis, Tennessee.
About ‘Grace town’:
Grace Town is an ongoing series of photographs made in and around Memphis, Tennessee.
A photograph is always a fiction, an indelible cipher; the image derives its power from questions it prompts the viewer to ask. I make pictures because of the impossibility of rendering a subject as he is, a place as it exists. The photograph exists as a distortion that masquerades as Truth. Following this view, I do not ascribe to the tenets of “documentary” as they stand today. Rather, my interest lies in the temporal and de-essentialized nature of self—the ways men perform for the camera as well as my own role in these performances that the camera prompts, and how I might wrestle with these narratives in characterizing place and identity.
