| Ms.
Baronio was trained in art history at Kenyon College in Ohio, graduating
in 1974. She went on to receive a master's of fine arts at Yale in 1976.
While studying art history and anthropology, she enrolled in a
photography course and, much to her surprise, found she preferred making
new images to researching existing ones.
In 2005 The Oxford Companion to the Photograph chose their jacket photograph from 42nd Street Studio series, 1980. |
In
the late ''70s Ms. Baronio spent four years photographing sex show
performers in her studio on 42nd Street and 8th
Avenue, while she was studying under Walker Evans at Yale. Unlike other
artists who had emphasized the dark, bleak, tawdry and cheap aspects of
these lives, Ms. Baronio removes these women from their dark enclaves,
bathing them in the daylight of her empty room. "I simply thought
of the performers as people and I wanted to see what would happen
if I shot them in bright natural sunlight, literally in a new
light." This series was published in a large-format book
entitled 42nd Street Studio which received the Award
for Excellence from the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1980.