“Just as the truth is spoken in jest, the way we sit for the camera both reveals and conceals. It’s indicative of how we really appear and how we wish to appear. And when you add to that what we as viewers bring to the photo—seeing it through our own lenses of what we know or think we know about that person and the factors that shape that life—looking at a portrait becomes a complex interaction. This truth seems inescapable when encountering ‘We Shall’. . . . Nearly a decade ago, D’Amato took his camera to the Chicago’s West Side, where he began photographing residents and the place they call home. For him, every encounter is a two-way street. . . . While D’Amato’s motive is more artistic than documentary, a creative act rather than social activism, he allows that these images can be more than pretty pictures.”

Thomas Connors, on the exhibition | Splash, Chicago Sun-Times

“Before he was President of the United States, the Illinois senator Barack Obama selected a suite of photographs by Paul D’Amato to hang in his congressional office. The images depicted scenes from the lives of regular people—a child, an old pastor—in Chicago, Obama’s hometown. . . . D’Amato pulls arresting shots from the difficult existence of a street prostitute or a single parent living in a slum, but most of his images build upon a narrative of uplifting personal and spiritual transformation, expressed by the exhibition’s title, ‘We Shall,’ which refers to a classic Civil Rights anthem but also to Paul the Apostle’s writings on the Resurrection. The images of churchgoers in their Sunday clothes, of baptism allegories in public pools, and of divine light shining into sitters’ eyes, heighten the motif of religious salvation.”

Photograph, on the exhibition

"This book of photos is excellent. No two ways about it."

Jonathan Blaustein | aPhotoEditor