Clarissa Bonet’s photographs feel like someone has pressed pause on the hive of the metropolis, to see what happens inside a single frame of time. In City Space, Bonet studies the shape and behavior of sunlight and shadow, and then carefully constructs street scenes that feel suspended, briefly illuminating the psychological space that runs under the daily routines. Her pictures exemplify photography’s power to slow and clarify our vision in the bustle of the city.

Early 20th century street photographers were alive to this power. And still today, an encounter with a print by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, or Henri Cartier-Bressson can awaken a kind of holy curiosity towards strangers from the past, and at photography’s unique capacity to render human activity into visual patterns. Bonet’s work can rouse similar feelings of discovery, but with novel perspective and technique.

Bonet looks for traces of people in the city, where their presence can be felt in something hidden. Half a face can be seen looking out from a grid of slatted windows. A spill left on the pavement marks a forgotten drama from earlier in the day. A close look at the silhouette of a man on the sidewalk reveals that his camera is trained to the spot where we, the viewers, are positioned and concealed in the shadows. Dark space in Bonet’s city feels somehow alive, like a plant that grows and recedes and claims territory. Shadows become additional characters, like projections of a person’s interior thoughts.

The figures who traverse the city carry their own problems, dilemmas, and daydreams through the urban passageways. They don’t seem to know they are being watched. They are each lost in their own moment, in the loneliness of the city, but also in its neutral open space. People navigate structures and stone pillars like an obstacle course in a sleepwalker’s trance.

Two prints from the series Stray Light are included in this exhibition. They observe the metropolis with even more distance and clarity. Bonet studies the arrangements that people form on the street during the day, and then traces them home at night, as they ascend into tall boxes behind grids of illuminated windows. In a place where excessive
artificial light floods out the view of the stars, Bonet forms constellations of glowing squares that replicate them in the night sky.

The scenes feel real and unplanned, but the lighting and the formal staging are so resolved that the photographs have a cinematic edge. They read like a film set, perhaps a minute or two after the decisive action. Despite
the quiet, there’s a monumental feeling lurking behind each image.

Clarissa Bonet is an artist based in Chicago whose work explores issues of the built environment in both a physical and psychological context. She holds an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago
and a BS in Photography from the University of Central Florida.

Bonet’s work has been exhibited at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Aperture Foundation, Magenta Foundation, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, among others.

Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, CNN Photo, Chicago Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, Juxtapoz, and The Eye of Photography, and many other publications both nationally and internationally.

Bonet’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Southeast Museum of Photography, Haggerty Museum of Art, University Club Chicago, and the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection.

Most recently, she received an Individual Artist Grant and Fellowship Finalist award from the Illinois Arts Council. Her work also won inclusion in “The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today’’ at The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

www.clarissabonet.com