Renato Colangelo

www.renatocolangelo.com

Dark Silver Threads

Dark Silver Threads explores portraiture as an expanded practice, intertwining representations of people with the environments they inhabit, remember and imprint upon. Through experimental photographic techniques and analogue darkroom processes, the work examines how identity is shaped by place, time, and relationships. Portraiture in this body of work moves beyond the single, static likeness, instead unfolding through duration, movement, and layered exposures that suggest emotional presence rather than literal description.

The project extends decades of documenting local communities, friends, family and the self, forming an intimate archive of lived experience. Working exclusively with analogue processes, and utilizing long and multiple exposures often made at night, has allowed a slower, more reflective engagement with subjects. These methods introduce traces, blurs, and shadows that speak to memory, fragility, and the passage of time, positioning the portrait as something unstable and evolving rather than fixed.

Drawing from an extensive archive of portraits made during the 1990s till now, the work reflects on a pivotal period in the artist’s life, marked by personal transformation and deep connections to specific places and communities. Figures appear intertwined with their surroundings, where domestic interiors, artist-run spaces, and decommissioned industrial sites such as Hoffman Brickworks and the Tip Top Bakeries become psychological as well as physical settings. These locations function as collective portraits in themselves, bearing the marks of the subcultures, friendships, and creative networks that once thrived within them.

By merging portraiture and place, Dark Silver Threads proposes that identity is inseparable from environment. The work acknowledges the intimacy of human relationships while recognising their vulnerability, emphasising how people, like spaces, are subject to change, disappearance and reinvention. Through analogue photography’s material qualities grain, silver, and darkness the portraits become acts of remembrance, holding onto fleeting moments and emotional residues that might otherwise be lost.

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