Matthew Connors

Abigail Cohen Rome Prize
September 2, 2024–July 3, 2025
Profession
Professor, Photography Department, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Project title
Shadows and the Silent Majority
Project description

During my residency, I plan to make a series of pictures that capture and reconstitute dramatic encounters in Rome’s public spaces. I will digitally collage fragments of photographs I take of Rome’s inhabitants against the backdrop of its anachronistic collisions of architecture. Real people will become unwitting actors in fictional encounters as I compress disparate times into credible, but manufactured moments. The result will be a waking dream, a believable conceit that questions the factual assumptions of photography and dramatizes the missed interactions, poetic accidents, and alienation of everyday urban experience.