ROBERT DISCALFANI

Coming soon

I photographed this series of portraits in Varanasi, India, where I encountered many desperately poor children suffering with unrepaired cleft lips and palates at one of the local hospitals, GS Memorial. With support from the US based children’s charity ‘SmileTrain,’ this medical facility, with their own local surgeons, has performed 17,000 life-changing cleft operations over the past 7 years.

It’s an honor to work with both SmileTrain and its partner hospital to help bring awareness to this widespread problem in India. By creating these alluring and powerful images of the children and their families, I hope to bring the importance of these operations to the public.

It was my desire to capture these portraits with a traditional approach, using film and a medium format camera. The final output of the film grain creates a painterly texture, which begs one to touch the print - a quality I wanted to translate from my experience, to the viewer.

This project has been one of my most rewarding photographic endeavors to date, as I feel it’s not only a very beautiful collection of work by itself, but the images are extremely compelling and meaningful as well. I am honored to have met these children, their families and the wonderful doctors who are changing their lives. If the only outcome of this body of work is that it brings more awareness to this easily correctible deformity and to the great charity that supports these local surgeons, then these photographs have achieved their mission.

As an artist, Robert DiScalfani is particularly curious about people. Subways deals with the fast paced coming and going of passengers on the New York City subway system. Coincidences and unexpected occurrences combined with the ‘decisive moment’ create the scene in this body of imagery.

Robert’s work on Subways, an ongoing project since 2001, shows a clear influence of documentary photography, but with a fine art twist. The dark moodiness of the imagery stems from Robert’s artistic vision, something that runs congruent throughout all of his photography. The merging of these two styles combined with the unexpected nature of people in this environment allows Robert to snap split second glances one might never catch in real life.