Priscilla Rattazzi spoke about her career in photography and what inspired her most recent body of work at the Society of The Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida on January 27, 2022.

Priscilla Rattazzi sealed her reputation as a fashion photographer in the 1980s. By the end of that decade, Ms. Rattazzi, a Roman living in New York, had turned from fashion to portraiture, capturing the likenesses of Diana Vreeland, Loulou de la Falaise, Gianni Agnelli (her uncle), and other contemporaries with an unexpected combination of astringency and warmth.

I territori incontaminati dell’Ovest, negli Stati Uniti, che accolgono le tribù dei nativi americani, sono in pericolo. Come testimonia il nuovo progetto fotografico di Priscilla Rattazzi, in mostra a New York,  che attraverso il suo lavoro contesta la decisione di Trump di espropriare due milioni di acri di territorio protetto nello Utah

“When Trump put those lands in jeopardy I was horrified. How could anyone want to ruin a landscape of such staggering beauty?” said Ms. Rattazzi, sitting among the thirty-six black and white pictures that are part of her exhibit. They will be shown for seven weeks until November 7. “The land is stunning and you feel you are walking on sacred grounds.”

“Hoodooland,” an exhibition of photographs by Priscilla Rattazzi, is opening today at the Staley-Wise Gallery in SoHo, continuing through Nov. 7. Ms. Rattazzi, who lives in New York City and East Hampton, photographed the weathered, mushroom-like rock formations in southwest Utah known as “hoodoos,” a name brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans.

Priscilla Rattazzi first visited southwest Utah ten years ago, where she explored and photographed the majestic and barren landscapes near Lake Powell and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

“When Yermo and I went to the Wahweap hoodoos for the first time at 3:30 A.M., he gave me a headlamp and insisted he didn’t need one,” says Priscilla Rattazzi, whose photographs of southwestern Utah, featuring the primeval rock formations known as hoodoos, go on display at New York’s Staley-Wise Gallery next week.

Precarious and looming mushroom-like rock formations are not something you would be expecting to see in New York City.

If you head out to the desert of Utah (perhaps for a stay at the remote Amangiri resort, which recently opened a set of luxury tented camps deeper into the property) you are likely to find hoodoos: tall, thin, mushroom-capped columns of rock formed by years of weathering and erosion. These geological wonders have enchanted the celebrated photographer Priscilla Rattazzi since she first visited southwest Utah 10 years ago and explored Lake Powell and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.