Toni Pepe

Can I Hold You? is an ongoing project that works with press photographs and newspaper clippings from the Women & Gender Issues Collection at the Boston Public Library. These prints were made quickly for circulation and carry that condition forward. Cropped, captioned, handled, marked. In the studio, I return to the surface, working with gouache, graphite, and blind embossment. I follow the crop marks drawn by editors decades ago, retracing their lines slowly, letting my hand move where another hand once moved.

I think of the photograph as something that continues to live in time. The surface holds more than the image. It holds pressure, touch, and decisions made and remade. A line drawn in one moment meets my hand in another. The paper shifts, the ink settles, the marks remain in motion. I stay with these changes, working with what the photograph has carried forward.