In his most recent work, Osceola Refetoff turns his lens toward Italy’s steel mills and railway lines, tracing the intertwined histories of motion, labor, and vision. Photographing from the train driver's compartment, he captures the landscape in a state of acceleration—rails splitting the frame, colors shifting into surreal registers of red, purple, and yellow, the view ahead vibrating with speed. These kinetic images are countered by his studies of the Bagnoli steelworks, where the monumental ruins of industry rest under the same infrared palette. The factories, scorched and luminous, feel both decaying and alive, their lingering heat rendered visible in Refetoff’s altered spectrum.
The dialogue between these two bodies of work is not merely geographic but conceptual. Both emerge from the 19th-century matrix that birthed the camera, the locomotive, and the blast furnace—machines that translate energy into form. Refetoff extends this lineage into the present, showing how the machinery of progress continues to structure our ways of seeing. His camera, like the steel mill or the train, is an engine of transformation, converting light and time into tangible image.
In the
Bagnoli series, Refetoff introduces scorch marks directly onto the photographic surface—gestures of heat and abrasion that recall the industrial processes his pictures depict. These marks burn through the illusion of the photograph, asserting its material presence. The result is a body of work that fuses vision and substance: the velocity of modernity meeting the weight of what it produces. Taken together, the train and factory images compose a meditation on momentum and aftermath—how the world we built to move faster still burns in the frames we make to remember it.
–Writer/curator Tyler Stallings IMAGE:
Prospettiva cinematografica – Esposizione multispettrale – Circumvesuviana – Campania, Italia – 2024
Cinematic Perspective – Multispectral Exposure – Circumvesuviana – Campania, Italy – 2024
First printed: 2025
Multispectral exposures combine near-infrared and visual spectrum light in camera using filters in front to the lens to control the wavelengths and colors recorded.
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