With his panoramic photos of everyday life, Dylan Vitone, a young photographer and professor from Pittsburgh, makes the mundane extraordinary. His exhibit, now on display at Bingham gallery, shows people from all walks of life.
Vitone, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has showed his collections in galleries across the country, such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Smithsonian and the Portland Art Museum.
Ferrie Craighead, a member of the gallery committee, explained the process of choosing an artist.
“We get some good ones in here from time to time,” Craighead said. “(Vitone) was brought in by the photo department last year to give a talk in the lab. A lot of times our professors will know of people through their networks, and say, ‘Hey I know a great fibers artist or a great photographer.’”
And so Dylan Vitone was brought in. He said he sought to appeal to all eyes with his Pittsburgh project.
“I really wanted to try to photograph every single kind of people as possible,” Vitone said. “And kind of make it an anthropological record of all the different kinds of people and all the different kinds of activities.”
He began photographing in college at St. Edwards University to fulfill a photography prerequisite for his major in communications.
“I just kind of fell in love with it,” he said.
The modest photographer combines everyday life into panoramic views to create his own style, or as he refers to it, as his “gimmick.” The pieces are usually 85 inches long and are a combination of six to eight separate images to create a 360 view.
“I wanted to document a lot and it was really hard doing it through just one frame,” Vitone said. “More importantly I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done already. It’s just a whole different photographing symbol.”
There are six fairly new projects featured on Vitone’s website. His process for capturing cities takes years. He’s lived Doha, Qatar, for weeks, spent summers in Miami for multiple years and took numerous trips to a site in Ohio to capture the essence of each location. Vitone shot photos five times a week in Pittsburgh, his hometown.
“I’m not a good photographer so I don’t work particularly fast,” he said. “I just shoot a lot of pictures and edit them down to something interesting.”
The artist’s newest collections were uploaded to his website just two days ago, but the Pittsburgh exhibit is his most well known.
“It definitely sounds cliché, but there’s a real beauty in seeing a lot of different people like that,” Vitone said. “I think a lot of times we identify so closely with one group of people — and through the pictures sometimes you can identify and connect with people from a whole lot of different classes and races; and maybe it breaks down all those barriers.”
Vitone’s work is on display from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday at the gallery. The exhibition will run until Oct. 7 and is free to the public.