Rikki Reich

Rikki Reich, a noteworthy photographer, came to our class and spoke about her life as an artist and some of the stories behind a few personal works. She passed around a few photographs dating back to when she first started to show us just a few things that she found interesting. Reich expressed that she was very fond of hard angles and lines and so within her earlier portraits there were traces of this effect. It was the last few photographs of the afternoon that lured in our focus and brought us to where Rikki Reich stood today with her works in progress. Her documented photographs of September 11, 2001 were extremely striking and amazing to look at. There were several pictures of the Twin Towers engulfed in smoke and they were blown up to a large size to show an immense amount of detail. Each photograph showed its signs of progress, as it was marked with ink and developed differently each time. It was astonishing to hear and see Reich’s “footsteps” in her pictures from that day. Most of us could explain where we were and what we did on that day as well, however Reich is one of the few who can actually show this terrible time to us within her own reality.