Program Description
Event Details
In tandem with his art exhibit, Photograph Recollections, on display at the Main Library Gallery (February 25-March 29), documentary filmmaker and long-time Oak Park resident Tom Palazzolo will present a series of his short films:
- Jerry's Deli
- Campaign (The 68 Democratic Convention)
- Rita on the Ropes
- Artist Viet Nam Protest
- Enjoy Yourself It's Later Than You Think
Palazzolo will discuss his films after the screening and bring light to his long and illustrious career in documentary photography and cinema.
About the artist
Tom Palazzolo is a Chicago-based documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work spans over 50 years. His photographs aim to capture chance encounters from everyday life. Palazzolo is drawn to "outsider people," seeking people and places that might result in an interesting and sublime photographic image. He is influenced by Robert Frank and other documentary photographers who give his work direction.
"Tom Palazzolo resides comfortably in his own sphere of reference, a domain that includes a rich heritage of art history and film as well as his own personal memories," says Callie Angel, Assistant Curator at Whitney Museum of Modern Art. "His familiar and gleeful attitude toward these weighty traditions allows him to draw from them freely while indulging in a virtuoso display of visual and verbal puns and obscure references."
Friend and early champion Roger Ebert dubbed Palazzolo “Chicago’s filmmaker laureate,” and wrote that you can feel his movies “smile about human nature.”
Palazzolo received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1965 and has exhibited his work in NY at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA, and the Lincoln Center as well as many other venues both here and abroad. He was a professor of Documentary Filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1965 to 1999, and Photo and Art classes at Richard Daley City College from 1965 to 2001.
In 1972, Tom and his wife Marcia moved to Oak Park. They raised their three children, Sarah, Amy, and Todd, who all attended grade school and high school in Oak Park.
*Photograph by Eileen Molony.
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