© Ruth L. Manenti from 'Excerpts'

Tell us about the project “Excerpts” among the winner of the Urbanautica Institute Awards 2021 edition? What is the motivation and the theme you addressed?

Ruth Manenti (RM): I live in a house that was built in 1940 in the Catskill Mountains. When we bought our house no-one else wanted it. It doesn’t have a garage, a paved driveway, a basement, more than one bath or bedroom which is why many people undervalued the house. It was also cluttered when we looked at it, but I immediately imagined it empty and knew it would be beautiful. The house has small windows that lets in a gentle light which is special to this house. Life is going by quickly and I have lost many people, close to me, and not, in ways unexpected or if expected, naively I did not see coming. I know that I will not live in this house forever. The house will hopefully outlive me, but I wonder if a part of me will outlive the house. I wish my dad could have visited, at least once. Somehow, with the passing of my parents, the need for a home I love feels more important. While creating this work, I had the sense that all the people in my life, still here or not, live with me in my house.” Above is the statement I wrote for the project. Since then, I have made several book versions, in search of the right edit and sequence etc. The latest book is called I Imagined It Empty. The earlier versions were on thinner and translucent paper and that gave the book a delicate, ghostly, and feminine feel. But in hindsight, by repeating with materials similar ideas that are in the pictures, each cancelled each other out.

© Book 'I Imagined it Empty', Ruth Manenti, RM editions, 2024 

What are the practical difficulties you faced in the development of this work?

RM: The biggest difficulty with this project is in giving it life outside my studio. As a book, the challenge is in editing, sequencing, and binding the pictures and pages, and ultimately publishing it. As of yet I have not found a way that serves the project best. I think if I was to work with an editor, publisher, book binder, printer etc. that would help me significantly to fully realize these concerns. As an exhibition, the difficulty is in finding a gallery that feels the work would fit with what they normally show, that they like the work enough to show it, and that they think it will sell. Fortunately, the project has been included in your journal Urbanautica as well as winning prizes with LensCulture and the Klompching gallery, and embraced by friends, classmates and other photographers whose work I love. This encouragement balances out some of the difficulty.

© Ruth L. Manenti from 'Excerpts'

From an editorial point of view, what choices guided you in the selection of the final portfolio?

RM: I tried with this work to have the abstract, immeasurable, and unknowable in dialogue with the tangible, namable and finite realities of life. Hence, I took a picture of my kitchen table with the emphasis on the horizon line, and then photographed the ocean with the same emphasis. Yet, the line of where the table meets the wall is finite and see-able and the ocean’s horizon line is far away and I cannot see where it ends. I placed a picture of a round bowl with bread dough in it just before a picture of the moon. I included several pictures of my mother chronologically as her material body was reaching its end. With each picture the materiality of her existence was slipping away, while her eternal nature was becoming more and more evident.

© Book 'I Imagined it Empty', Ruth Manenti, RM editions, 2024

© Book 'I Imagined it Empty', Ruth Manenti, RM editions, 2024

© Ruth L. Manenti from 'Excerpts'

What are the themes that interest you, what generally attracts your observation?

RM: I’m interested in the everyday, my surroundings, the gift of life, corny as that may sound. I’ve always thought of beauty as a quality one could choose to be aware of. My father found beauty in the whole in his shirt; in the way that it spoke of impermanence and fragility. My mother was grateful that there was a tree she could admire from the kitchen window while washing dishes. Both my parents were refugees from Europe and had endured a lot of suffering. Yet they lived with poetic sensibilities, and I have that from them.

© Ruth L. Manenti from 'Excerpts'

© Ruth L. Manenti from 'Excerpts'

© Ruth L. Manenti from 'Excerpts'

From a methodological point of view, what is your approach to the medium?How do you envision or conceptualize the projects?

RM: One way that I approach photography is as a painter, in that I have a studio I go to almost daily and a practice of setting things up to photograph in the way that a painter sets up a still life. I rarely photograph things as they are, or as I find them. Even if I go somewhere or if people other than myself are involved, I move things around considerably to make my picture. Occasionally I see something that catches my eye and I think “oh, that would make a great photograph” but often in the end, those pictures feel alien to me, as if they belong to someone else. I never know what my “project” is until at least halfway through it. I let myself take pictures. I get an idea, I follow it through, that leads to another idea, and I don’t put too much pressure on myself to know what I’m doing.

Do you privilege any camera or process in particular? Tell us about your equipment ...

RM: I use a 4 x 5 camera. I like the ground glass as it helps me to see clearly. I like being able to focus on a particular object, while leaving the rest in a semi focused state. I feel that best reflects the way I view my surroundings, part in and part out of focus. The camera is slow, manual and needs to rest on a tripod. That also suits me as I’m not fast, I don’t like to do things on automatic and I search for stability in my footing.

© Ruth L. Manenti from 'Excerpts'

Does research play any role in your practice?

RM: Research does not have a significant role in my work in any kind of obvious way. However, I am steeped in movies, literature, paintings, poems, music, and spiritual books going far back into previous times. I would say I fight a bit with the pull of the past, wanting to be contemporary. Ulrich Seidl, the Austrian filmmaker was interested in why so many people have pets. Through his research he made numerous interviews with pet owners and learned that people live with animals mostly out of loneliness and a need for companionship. Out of that inquiry he made a powerful film called Animal Love. I have thought it would be interesting to approach a project in that way, research European Jews, retired scientists, people who clean for a living, have experienced trauma tragedy or feel that something inside has died though they still carry on, or the rise and fall of high and low tides at different times of day, weather or seasons. But I have yet to actualize or even attempt such a project.

© Ruth L. Manenti from 'Excerpts'

© Ruth L. Manenti from 'Excerpts'

Any interesting books that you recommend and that recently inspired you and why?

RM: After Joan Didion died, I reread all her books. When I was twenty, I broke my neck in a car crash. After that I spent 2 years in bed. In the hospital I could have had a TV for 2 dollars a day. Somehow, I had the wisdom to know that my time would be better spent reading than watching endless TV. I read Russian novels, Virginia Wolfe, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Hemingway, one book led to another book, Beckett, Bellows, Proust, Balzac, Dreier, and on and on. Since my activities were so limited, I could read without distraction. In a way I had no life of my own so I could fully embrace the lives and stories of the characters I was reading about. During the pandemic I read Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Rider, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, then also I had more time. Currently I am reading Brad Zellar’s Until the Wheel’s Fall Off, which I love. Throughout my life I have read spiritual and philosophical books from different Eastern traditions. All of this reading has provided a much-needed refuge for me from the ups and downs of life and taught me about other people, places and myself. For that reason, I am grateful for my car accident because that lit a fire of reading and learning within me, and before that I was quite reckless. I am also grateful to Jenia Fridlyand, Tim Carpenter, Matthew Genitempo, An My Le, Lois Conner, and The Long Term Photobook Program participants. without these people I could not have made “Excerpts”.

Ruth Lauer Manenti (website)
Book 'I Imagined it Empty' (RM editions)
Urbanautica Institute Awards 2021 (catalog)