PETER
ROMANELLI
P H O T O G R A P H Y
BIOGRAPHY
NEW ENGLAND | SOUTHWEST | PORTRAITS | COMMERCIAL | BIO
My last semester in college I decided to take an intro Geography course. I had worked as a photographer for the Geography Department prior to this and had done some independent research on the geology of Cape Cod, but I wasn't prepared for the satisfaction that the study of Geography offered. It answered such questions as, "Why is the sky blue?" Geography, which is defined as the study of the spatial distribution of people and resources on the face of the planet, can be summarized in the colloquial phrase, "Where it's at." As a landscape photographer this was like discovering a gold mine. Not only could I appreciate the beauty in the landscape, but I could also understand why rocks were here and pine trees were there and the reason for the shapes and patterns that I found so intriguing.
Although I hadn't planned it, my undergraduate thesis in Cinema (BA, Harpur College, SUNY Binghamton) turned out to be a poetic depiction of the coastal geology of the Atlantic shoreline of Cape Cod. Later, instead of studying environmental perception in graduate school (MA, Geography, Columbia University), I undertook a study of the ecology of the outer Cape. I analyzed soil samples from different plant communities and was able to correlate increasing organic matter with successively more complex plant associations. This study was conducted on the Provincetown sand spit and described the evolution of the sterile soil of a sand bar into the complex beech climax forest that is part of the Cape Cod National Seashore. One of my photographic projects, A New Chautauqua, is a product of this integration or art and science.
As a primarily self-taught photographer, my sense of proportion, balance and composition are derived from nature. It is a sort of innate belief that the natural world holds the keys to a set of universal symbols found on earth in the patterns and shapes of our landscapes. Connecting to these symbols is an important part of my photography.