Within Petillo’s work, there have always been forms. Sometimes, objects suspended in space, and other
times, featured in industrial backdrops, always laid bare so you could regard the thing as something other
than its purely functional state. Then came the people. Austere, emotionally stripped, pleading—portraits
that would soon garner him attention and jobs that had him shooting musicians with name recognition.
Though generally clothed, these portraits were leading him somewhere new, to try a confluence of his own
styles. “The thought came to me,” Petillo explains, “just shoot the nudes in the style that you approach all of
your other shoots with.”
Petillo's latest work, titled “Just A Way Out” found its crucible in Hot Springs, Arkansas, occasionally in
the very space in which this collection will first be seen. We now see nudes placed in industrial settings, or
hanging, suspended in space, begging a metaphysical reaction to something we’ve come to lazily regard in
only the physical sense. Thomas is at play, his fears long behind him.
“I guess, at first, shooting them meant proving to myself that I could even do it. And then it meant proving
that it wasn’t a fluke, that I could do it again. And now, it means continuing to do it at a high enough level.
One that no longer scares me.”
