Osceola Refetoff documents humanity’s impact on the world – both the intersection of nature and industry, and the narratives of people living at those crossroads. His parallel careers as a photojournalist and fine art photographer are characterized by a commitment to capture not only how a place looks, but how it feels to be there. Overall, images in Refetoff’s body of work exist within traditional means – landscape, portraiture, editorial – and they are variously produced using film, digital, infrared, and pinhole exposures, according to what best expresses the character of his subjects. His process generally happens “in camera,” at the moment of capture. Thus, despite his documentarian impulses and the fact that his images often depict quite ordinary, sometimes mundane subjects, he trains on them a hyper-realistic and nuanced vision, often yielding surreal, even dreamlike images.
