Penny Rakoff
(New York, New York, 1951 - )
North America, American
Penny Rakoff’s vibrant color photographs of urban night scenes in Ohio and Florida depict the real world in an unfamiliar way. The artist seeks out spaces illuminated by a variety of artificial light sources, knowing that color film will interpret their hues in excitingly exaggerated ways. She also utilizes long exposures to brighten her nocturnal views so that they appear somewhere between night and day. Rakoff’s pictures usually do not include people, and so they suggest a surreal world that emerges after nightfall, when no one may be looking.
Rakoff was born in New York City and raised on Long Island. Trained in painting, the artist has translated her interest in color theory and composition to her photographic work. By controlling and manipulating natural and artificial light in extended night-time exposures, she conjures spectral, often surreal displays from otherwise banal subject matter. After earning her B.F.A. from the University of Michigan (1973), she pursued photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology (M.F.A., 1976) and with Nathan Lyons at the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester (1978). After teaching for a year at the State University of New York College at Oswego, in 1978 Rakoff relocated to Ohio to accept a position at the University of Akron, where she continues to teach as an emeritus professor. She is the recipient of awards from the Ohio Arts Council (1981, 1982, 1986, 1988, 1994) and from the Cleveland Museum of Art for her entries in the museum's regional juried exhibition, the May Show (1984, 1987).