Osceola Refetoff

Osceola Refetoff is a Canadian American visual artist and photojournalist known for his experimental and innovative use of infrared and pinhole photography to document humanity’s ongoing relationship to the physical world. Across parallel careers in photojournalism and fine art, his diverse series are characterized by a hyper-realistic yet nuanced clarity, often yielding surreal, even dreamlike images.
A graduate of New York University’s Master of Fine Arts Film Program, Refetoff’s motion picture background informs a distinctly cinematic approach to constructing engaging visual narratives that explore both time and space. Key to this practice is the artist’s old-school commitment to capturing his scenes “in-camera,” using archaic lens filters and handmade pinhole attachments that do not alter reality but instead offer new ways to see it. This foundationally realist approach combined with the magic of historical and alternative photographic processes yields a prismatic array of images that transform the external world into something both unchanged and extraordinary.