CHAPTER 1 - QUID EST
At the beginning I thought I might leave this for the end, as a closing comment, a conclusion, but I think it is more honest to talk about it right now, before hate mail or bullying messages start clogging my inbox! So many times people ask themselves, or even worse, ask others, if what they are doing is Street Photography. Ladies and Gents, I give you the biggest scam, the worst fallacy in the contemporary art photography. There is no such a thing as photographic genre, style, trend, movement. We are not painters, nor artisans! Clumsy poets, maybe! The photographer is a peculiar human being. Within days, an isolated and socially limping individual, finds a way to connect to an otherwise untouchable world. One day, all 3-dimensional monsters become 2-dimensional pets! One day, all ghosts and nightmares are packed in a box, if necessary with a straightjacket. One day, the photographer wakes up and decides (s)he has something to say. Only that words wouldn't do. Words wouldn't be enough, either because of a young and untrained logos, or because of a constant failure to verbally communicate with peers! To be cont'd NB: The pictures featuring here won't be in the book. I only wish I could have been the author. Instead, they reflect quite well my thoughts and this makes them extraordinary in my eyes. I am grateful to all those who give me the opportunity to see also throught theirs. Michail Moscholios - Photo by George Tsilis
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Starting from one basic concession: what is left to imagination is not engaging the author, what is left to interpretation is romantic, what is left to ambiguity can only benefit the instigator.
Politics is bad poetry! War of sexes is toxic poetry! Cinematography is autistic poetry! Photography is embryonic poetry! "We have plenty of matches in our house" Jarmusch is reciting Padgett in Paterson, slowly, autistically … and the viewer, puzzled, has no way out, but to agree on the masterpiece. Taking it from there, less is more, less is best, less is safe! Don't say much, suppress impulse, fade the clear, hide the obvious! Deduct, isolate, focus-out, dissimulate, confuse, sow doubt! Democracy and public debate are shrunk into 140-character tweets! Dialectics have conveyed ownership to lovers and they are doing a fabulous job … in getting wasted! One day, hopefully, there will be an explicit, clear, honest, verbose art! Until then, enjoy a moment of absolute peace brought to you by an extremely talented Filipino GSP! More on Chi Alvarez How do you visit an exhibition?
Do you walk by and stop only when impressed by something? Do you prefer the exhibits which seem to attract most of the crowd? Do you quickly scan around and approach only when you guess that the details would have been interesting? Well in all of the above cases you would have missed Raluca's work. You would have passed by her invisible, to the naked eye, worlds. Because everything is hidden in a minor part, a secondary level, but which, once discovered, becomes the protagonist, the centrifugal point of the frame. Of course the author knows all that, and in a creative clever way, uses a chromatic bait to lure us into a seemingly artificial reality, a maquette detail where everything is synthetic, and where the horizon is a plastic backdrop, all backlit with a pink diffuser. Following Raluca's work over time I come to the conclusion that she is a master of the negative spaces, her frames giving a meaningful purpose to a nonessential feature. The more I look at the present picture the less I find a reading path other than entering from the thick, palpable chasm of an empty, foggy sky (or its simulacrum). A necessary void in order to introduce us to the main stage of homo faber, alone and lonely, surrounded by all his symbolic structures; bridges, stairs and engineered flora. More on Raluca Furtuna |
This is the public curated Gallery of the STREET CORE PHOTOGRAPHY Group
Author
Michail Previous
August 2018
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