Regina DeLuise: The Hands of My Friends

Regina DeLuise: The Hands of My Friends by Sara J. WinstonJanuary 27, 2025

The Hands of My Friends by Regina DeLuise, published in 2024 by Saint Lucy Books, presents a carefully considered survey of the artist’s life as a photographer. The monograph is 9.5 x 11 inches, hard cover and cloth bound, and gives attention to forty years–approximately 1980 through 2020–of Ms. DeLuise’s exacting technical skills and sensitivity from under the dark cloth with her 8×10 view camera.

The book holds nearly 100 photographs and a handful of drawings created by the artist. While the pictures are made over four decades the photographs are timeless. The perfect exposures yield scenes that look as though they might have been captured yesterday in Monroe, New York, rather than Purchase, New York in 1980, or Villa d’esme, Tivoli, Italy in 1994.

The subject matter isn’t limited to any one thing or one place. The book includes still life, portraiture, landscape, and images that feature light as the sole subject. It feels as though we are being shown the reality that there is more beauty in the world than our eyes can bear. When it is hard to remember that truth, I urge you to consider engaging with The Hands of My Friends.

“Working with an 8×10 view camera invariably calls attention to the photographer. It is an impressive and intriguing object, and the curiosity of gatekeepers often allows me to move into spaces where a conventional camera would be turned away. Photographing in this way is slow, meditative and demands exertion; it amplifies the mysterious nature of image making, how place, light, collaboration and patience, reveal a moment worth knowing and preserving.” – Regina DeLuise

Felicia McCarren, Professor in the Department of French & Italian at Tulane University and subject of five portraits in the book, contributes a stunning essay that describes the dance between the photographer, the camera, and the subject. She encapsulates the synergy that exists between those three in the moment a photograph is made, and then, how the exchange in that fraction of a moment exists in the aftermath. She writes:

“Who, precisely, is taking, and who is giving? And what is taken; what is given?

The photographer takes–and then gives–me, in the photograph, a likeness–a piece of myself. And in so doing returns me not only that moment of my life when I stood on loggia in Fiesole or on a dune in the Sahara as the shutter closed, but also all the moments up to and after that closing which is an opening.”

Regina DeLuise is an artist, photographer, and educator whose work is represented in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and SF MoMA. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She is Professor Emerita at the Maryland Institute College of Art. DeLuise is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC.

Saint Lucy Books publishes elegant, idiosyncratic, and accessible books that combine words and images to celebrate contemporary photographic artists, and to explore the marginal, hidden, and parallel histories of photography.

Sara J. Winston is an artist and contributing editor at Lenscratch.

Follow Regina DeLuise, Saint Lucy Books, and Sara J. Winston on Instagram:
@reginadeluise; @saint_lucy_books; @sarajwinston

Tags: Regina DeLuise, Saint Lucy Books, Sara J. Winston