An archive of all of the disappearing newsstands in New York City.
Born in 1981 in Cambridge, MA, Rachel Barrett is a fine art photographer based out of New York. Barrett received her BFA in Photography & Imaging from NYUâ??s Tisch School of the Arts in 2003 and MFA in Photography, Video & Related Media from School of Visual Arts in 2008. A 2010-11 Tierney Fellow and 2011 PDNs 30, Barrett has exhibited nationally including shows at The Camera Club of NY, Sara Tecchia Gallery, Barbara Krakow Gallery, Minneapolis Center for Photography and Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Her work has been published in The Sunday New York Times, Photo District News Russian Esquire and Next American City Magazine and acquired into several private collections. An adjunct professor of photography at Kingsborough Community College and The College of Staten Island, Barrett has lectured at the School of Visual Arts and the Mills Gallery in Boston, and been interviewed on WPS1.
Much of Barrettâ??s work is deeply rooted in nostalgia and memory; the act of making pictures fulfills desires to collect the present and preserve the past, as seen in her extensive archive of the disappearing newsstands of New York City. Recent work, which consists of portraits, interiors and landscapes, has focused on iterations of communal life as manifested in â??Bolinasâ?? an off-the-grid community in Northern California, resting precariously on the coast of the Pacific, with a long cultural and agricultural history where women are at the helm; and in â??Josiahâ??s Farmâ??, a shared home in the Catskills where Mennonites-raised young men from Virginia are cultivating the land and their own version of masculinity. Both series delve into the cross-section of reality and fantasy that manifests in these places. The camera becomes the means with which to visually, emotionally and psychologically investigate the fictions we create for ourselves and what compels us to behave in these ways.
