In Local Stories, Jerry Spagnoli contests the notion of history as a narrative told to support particular agendas, and installs personal experience in its placethe myriad stories we as individuals create on a daily basis. History is no longer a chronicle of facts written by those in power, but a collaborative social fabric shaped by our memories and ever growing. It is beyond the power of any medium to communicate that vast ocean of experience, but perhaps it is possible to point in that direction, explains Spagnoli, These images are my attempt. His photos encompass the city, suburbia, the countryside and all between throughout the worldfrom the neon noise of Times Square to a peaceful cafe on the Île Saint-Louis, from a street parade to friends picnicking under cherry blossoms, from the Forbidden City to surfers bobbing patiently on their boards, waiting for the next wave. This fundamental sensation of moving through time is what unites us all as humans and presiding over it all, there before the beginning, and certain to be there after the end, the sun in the center of the sky.

Born in New York in 1956, Jerry Spagnoli is one of the principal practitioners of the daguerreotype and lectures regularly on the subject. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. Spagnoli's work has appeared in many books, and Steidl has published his Daguerreotypes (2006), American Dreaming (2011) and Regard (2019).