Chuck Ramirez: All This And Heaven Too I McNay Art Museum

Ramirez brought high production values to his practice, adopted from an earlier career in graphic and product design. He pursued a form of photographic minimalism, presenting individual objects against white studio backdrops, stripping away context to focus solely on the thing itself. And he often printed his images in large scale, up to audience, to focus precisely on things that we might well regard as extraneous, as visual detritus. These things, Ramirez was saying, were loaded with meaning. Peel away, look inside, probe deeper—there is always a story to tell.

Excerpt from Elizabeth Ferrer, "Every Picture Tells a Story," All This and Heaven Too, McNay Art Museum, 2017.