Anthony Randell

By the time he was a year old, Anthony Randell’s mother and grandmother realized that despite all their prayers, he would never be a priest.

Born in Brooklyn in the summer of 1961, the youngest son in an extended and close-knit Italian/English/Irish family, Anthony’s particular vocation lay in quite a different direction. 

Influenced by his father, who was a photographer and graphic artist for CBS television, Anthony pursued his own interest in photography with study and internships with David Vestal, Ben Fernandez, Gilles Peress, and Rebecca Blake.  He was awarded the Arthur Rothstein Grant for Documentary Photography and a World Image Award, student category, and graduated from Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography.

If his mother was mistaken about seeing the priesthood in her son’s future, she was perhaps right when she later told him he was both blessed and cursed, that in fact his blessing was his curse.  A hint of this duality is discernable in these current images, which Anthony has referred to as his “Catholic nudes.”  His choice of the word “catholic” is apt, both in its religious sense and in its meaning of an all-embracing universality.  The images speak to his ability to acknowledge and to express in an unexpected way the unconquerable beauty he finds everywhere (even in the least likely places) and to enable others to see it by sharing it.