Arturo calls this photograph Metro of Madrid. I call it the inevitable.
Inevitably we will carry Moriyama and d'Agata with us for many years. Inevitably the more we grow in photography the less the instruments will help us. And inevitably time betrays us. Inevitably street core photography is a child's dream. It starts with some broken toys, and when asleep, everything comes to life to become the worst of nightmares. And inevitably the broken toys will quickly give place to broken existences. But, screaming masks instead of faces, photograms and movie stills instead of decisive shutter releases, phantomatic grain instead of silky realities, phantasmal crops instead of fully framed captures, are they enough in order for them to be more than a curator's refuge, a judge's safe room? Inevitably a psychologic portrait as the present one will talk the same language with most of the viewers who are unable of separating an objective reality from the one formed by own desires and fears, unable to repeal narcissism. "The fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings does not prove the validity of these ideas and feelings. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health." Fromm BACK TO FB LINK
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Two brush strokes, 2 zagged diagonals, a high focal to reduce down to 2 dimensions; 2 subjects, ordinary and yet not.
The static male/female delivered in thoughts, shy and yet bold, wanting to be seen, but why there? The moving male, both arms abandoned, bypassing everything even his young life. In modern times of photography everything has been said (allegedly). And still, HCB Istanbul stairs can be revisited using simplicity in the structure and complexity in the conception! Denis Dukhovnik renders worlds of multiple readings (and feelings), creates ambiguous and perilous states of mind (attraction, repulsion, acute doubt). A world with no shadows, ceremonial individuals, luxury cars in handicap parking spots, the whole submerged in primary concrete ... with no embellishment, no mercy, no resignation ... LINK BACK TO FB The other day in a photography/psychology initiation we were trying to see what a photograph is conveying to us in order to better understand ourselves.
The fact is that photography is a double edged knife with no grip. It cuts out both the photographer and the viewer. Trying to explain exclusively our own photographs, has the advantage of making less victims. Having said that, all obsessive photographers (already a pleonasm) know instinctively that nothing is definitely idyllic or nightmarish until it has been photographed. A picture can free the author and devastate the viewer, as easily as it can harm the photographer and save the spectator. This inherent duality of a photograph is sometimes coupled with the explosive tension of a waiting, a longing. We cannot fail to underline here, how Ahmet is capturing the irreconcilable destinies of the boys, not to mention the temporal and spatial remoteness of the old man. The author grasps the smell of the ionised scene and at the same time knows how to "stage" the subjects in it (figure-to-ground for the main points of interest, uncertain low-key for the subject closer to the menacing obscurity of the open end of the frame). Unavoidably Ahmet went through all the struggle of the process before the liberating shutter release. I am sure he was exhausted when putting out the camera. Who wouldn't be? LINK BACK TO FB What is architecture? Is it a relationship of love and hate between humans and their habitat?
Or is it, philosophically put, the creative manipulation of functional, social, environmental and aesthetic constraints; the handling of materials, light and shadow, so that conflicting situations must be resolved? It is obvious that the above can apply to any form of art. The notion of art cannot be confined. Here George is documenting how humans resolve the conflict between survival, inherited post-communist spatial decay, and social reclusion. All of this is not sketched and recited over a designer's plot but merely on a temporal and spatial mirage. A photograph! LINK BACK TO FB |
This is the public curated Gallery of the STREET CORE PHOTOGRAPHY Group
Author
Michail Previous
August 2018
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