Dale Rio

The pages that were assigned to me pertain to the idea of stare decisis, which, when translated from the original Latin, means “to stand by things decided.”1 The concept of precedent is complicated and nuanced, and I found myself struggling to find a way to interpret and represent it visually. But it made me think about power; how it’s wielded and by whom. How, historically, women and other disenfranchised groups have been dictated to by the powerful, oftentimes wealthy men who are dissociated from the day-to-day realities of the people whose lives will be directly impacted by their decisions and edicts.

Throughout my life as a photographer, I have often combined image and text. One day, phrases representing situations that I imagined would never be experienced by the current Supreme Court justices started popping into my head. Not strictly limited to abortion rights, the phrases related to issues like sexual assault, poverty, immigration, and societal gender constructs, as well as envisioned outcomes of the Court’s decisions, and highlighted the intersectionality of various disempowered groups. The phrases finish the sentence “I will never know how it feels to...” and represent situations foreign to many of those sitting on the Court; justices who not only make decisions lacking in empathy but exercise extreme confirmation bias in their interpretations of the Constitution, conforming it to their religious beliefs while willfully ignoring the contextual realities in which the document was written.

I wanted to create a visual that would represent the violence that underpins the power dynamic that exists in our patriarchal society. I immediately thought of bloodstain patterns, the analysis of which was a focus of mine while in a Masters program for forensic science. I typed out the phrases I had collected on sheets of outdated photo paper using an antique typewriter and utilized the chemigram process to replicate bloodstains, incorporating some of my own blood into the process as a resist. The result is a beautiful but repellent image where the words are often obscured – drowned out – by the chaos, akin to how the voices of the disenfranchised are drowned out by the powerful and those willing to visit violence upon others for their own gain

Bio

Dale Rio is a photographic artist whose work explores issues such as mortality, human constructs, and man's relationship with the natural world.  Utilizing film and historic photographic processes, Dale employs “straight” photography to document the world around her and also creates conceptual imagery in response to that world. Her work has been shown extensively in the US, as well as in England, Germany, and New Zealand/Aotearoa, and has been reproduced in countless publications. She has authored one book and co-authored a second.

Dale received a BA in Studio Art and Russian Literature from Smith College and an MFA in Photography with a minor in Printmaking from Pratt Institute.  She has been awarded a Fulbright Travel Grant and the Miguel Vinciguerra Grant, received a Windgate Scholarship to study the Daguerreotype process, and attended residencies at Penland School of Craft, the Studios at Mass MoCA, and the Farmington Valley Arts Center.

Dale worked for nearly a decade as a master darkroom printer (both black and white and color), has taught workshops at various art and photo centers for well over a decade, served as editor-in-chief at Black Graves Media for six years, and has curated upwards of ten photography exhibitions.  

Dale is co-founder of The Halide Project a non-profit dedicated to film and historic process photography, owner of Point A to Point B: analog explorations, a print publication featuring travel- and place-based analog work, and founder of Lux et Libera: women at the intersection of light and chemistry, an initiative seeking to recognize the leading role women play in film and alternative/historic processes and create more opportunities for them.

Largely nomadic, Dale has currently set up basecamp in the Northeastern US where she works as a forensic photographer, having received an MS in Forensic Science from The George Washington University and worked previously as a crime scene and death investigator.