"The smoke from the burnouts becomes overwhelming, after a while. Your eyes sting and your lungs are screaming for a break from the rubber residue in the air. The combination of smoke and noise leads to these strange dreamlike moments where without the benefit of information of the scenario, it’s difficult to make sense of the events. The actions of the people in the photographs seem totally at odds with what appears to be going on within their landscape." – Michael Corridore, 2012.
Photographer Michael Corridore's primary interest over the past six years has been inventing new narratives around car culture. After photographing spectators at various races and burnouts contests, Corridore began to explore moments where figure, landscape and atmosphere converged. The resulting Angry Black Snake series features barely recognisable spectators cloaked in a foggy landscape.
A commercial photographer with a substantial art portfolio, Corridore was born in Melbourne but now lives in Sydney, spending time between New York and Australia on assignments.
"For six years the Angry Black Snake project has led me down a path of searching for fiction captured within real moments… the images are unreliable documentary…they don’t tell the right stories…they don’t give up information," Corridore writes in his artist statement for Angry Black Snake.
Angry Black Snake received New York’s Aperture Foundation Portfolio prize in 2009. Aperture’s book publisher and editor of over 65 books on photography, Lesley A. Martin, says of the project: "Corridore’s Angry Black Snake, is an exercise in minimalism. Each image has been pared down to the barest of elements - urgent gestures and barely traceable figures cloaked in smoke and dust. Yet each image pulses with palpable emotional tension, telegraphed by these barest of representational sketches and the subtle shifting colours of the clouds that descend upon each scene like a flimsy curtain."
A selection of work from the Angry Black Snake series is now showing in Melbourne at Edmund Pearce Gallery,
Level 2, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston St (cnr Flinders Lane). The
exhibition is on Wednesday to Saturday 11am – 5pm until 1 September
2012.
Michael Corridore's work is held in several permanent collections including: The Art Gallery of New South Wales; Gold Coast Art Gallery; Ipswich Art Gallery and the Haggerty Museum of Art, USA. He has been selected as a finalist in numerous art prizes both in Australia: National Photographic Portrait Prize, Josephine Ulrich and Win Schubert Prize, Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize, Olive Cotton Portrait Prize, Citigroup Portrait Prize and the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize in 2011; and in New York: Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize, and the New York Photo Festival. He has exhibited extensively both in Australia and overseas. He is represented by The Kitchen Creative Management in Sydney.
More information: www.michaelcorridore.net 
Photo by Michael Corridore. (Angry Black Snake series.)
Photo by Michael Corridore. (Angry Black Snake series.)
Photo by Michael Corridore. (Angry Black Snake series.)
Photo by Michael Corridore. (Angry Black Snake series.)
Photo by Michael Corridore. (Angry Black Snake series.)
Photo by Michael Corridore. (Angry Black Snake series.)