In the 1952 book The Decisive Moment, Cartier-Bresson produced images taken throughout Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, Mexico, England, and many other countries, thereby encouraging the notion of chance in composing a good photograph. Modernist photographers, while travel ing including Cartier-Bresson, began to reveal themselves in their work while responding to current trends in other areas of fine art. Without staging his compositions, Cartier-Bresson was able to capture the decisive moment when all when all the formal aspects of a photograph were present and his subjects exposed their innermost truth and beauty —or as he said, “the precise organization of form,” paving the way for contemporary photo essays such as Sicilian Journey.

Janine Coyne has added yet another dimension to personal exploration while eloquently exposing the rawness of Sicily with the technical agility of a mature artist. The photographs from this series lead the viewer to contemporary insights relevant to our experience today. Coyne’s commonplace themes of everyday life as portrayed in art offer an aesthetic question, which has baffled art historians throughout the last two hundred years.

As an Italian American woman artist, Janine Coyne communicates her past through her choice of imagery.