Men

Viewers may find it surprising that these supremely masculine images of men in action are the work of a young woman artist. The torero in the sunlight, the boxer with his torn face in the ring, the fisherman alone on the sea?these fighting men possess a Hemingwayesque quality of solitary courage. But Giorgia Fiorio's startling photographs are more than a mere glorification of male ideals. They are the result of the artist's ten-year search for what she calls archetypes, a quest that brought her to the rain forest to experience the world of the Foreign Legion, to the coal mines of the Ukraine, to Russian prison camps, German submarines, and Scottish fishing boats. Fiorio's exploration of valor is amply reflected in her own courageous efforts as a woman plunging into the midst of a man's world. The results are arresting, sympathetic, poetic, unwavering and timeless portraits of men reduced to their most primal essence, captured by a woman searching for an ideal that may no longer exist.