Allison Gretchko (b.1995) is an American photographer and writer currently residing in London. She holds a B.S. in Sociology from Skidmore College and is currently pursuing a MFA in Photography at the Royal College of Art.
Previously, she worked as a commercial photographer for brands and companies such as The Hundreds, Fodor’s Travel, Wetaca, Closed Sessions, etc. and has appeared in numerous digital and print publications including The Fader and My Ism.
Allison’s practice is driven by investigations into the intimacies of hidden relationships and behaviors found in the everyday. Beginning with the act of observational documentary image-making, her work often culminates in collection and category-based conceptual series that showcase the secret intimacies in society. In the hopes of uncovering the universality of humanity, Allison examines the interaction between identity, place, objects, and relationships from both her own lived experience and the anonymity of strangers.
Working across film and digital photography, Allison’s practice encompasses a wide variety of photographic skillsets in order to best articulate her vision.
A series that spans over a decade of personal documentary work on 35mm film beginning when I was a teenager grappling with the typical coming of age struggles of personal identity while facing a nearly fatal viral infection. Photographing my parents began with the search to understand the rapidly changing world around me as I confronted my own mortality and later the prospect of theirs. As I healed, the project continued to examine the parent-child relationship and its ever evolving phases of care, duty, and expectations of understanding and closeness. The photographs seek to convey the turbulence and intimacy of familial relations as I exist both as an outsider and insider to their world. Over the past year, I have begun to dissect the archive of this ongoing project for the first time and the show’s slideshow projection is the initial iteration of analyzing the emotions, gestures, and gaze the camera has captured as the mediator in the complex relationship between my parents and I.
Taking inspiration from how Upper Paleolithic Venus Sculptures were crafted, this self-portrait series examines the natural distortion of the female figure when examined from one's own eye level. A study of a perspective only beheld by the photographer's own eyes.
