There is a team of GSP* somewhere in West Romania who are producing a spectacular and consistent body of work.
Today they are giving us, throught the best of the ways (by the example), an analysis of how essential is the point of view of each photographer (same sun, same piece of the world, same slice of time, different visual narration). And since I have been (self)criticised that I am writing non-sense, useless, kilometric critiques, I am taking the liberty to just quote some great thoughs of some of the greatest thinkers. - "What is the use, then, of all your traveling?" - "It is evening. We are seated on the steps of your palace. There is a slight breeze." Marco Polo answered. "Whatever country my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point, even if instead of the palace there is a village on pilings and the breeze carries the stench of a muddy estuary." Italo Calvino - Invisible cities "The Surrealist strategy, which promised a new and exciting vantage point for the radical criticism of modern culture, has devolved into an easy irony that democratizes all evidence, that equates its scatter of evidence with history. Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip." Susan Sontag - On photography "From the Renaissance onwards, perspective in art converged on the single spectator, who could only be in one place at a time. The implication was that images were timeless. Photography, in particular the movie camera, changed this. What you saw depended on your place in time and space. The camera changed the way artists saw. Impressionists saw the visible in continuous change [as the light changed so did the appearance of the object] and Cubists no longer recognised a single vantage point [so, for example, they would paint a face with an eye seen from one vantage point and the nose from another]." John Berger - Ways of seeing By changing the camera’s vantage point the relationships change. These relationships are the result of photographic vision. Out of the studio the photographer is faced with a continuously changing set of relationships as he moves around. In bringing order to this situation, a photographer solves a picture more than composes one." John Szarkowski - The photographer's eye _____________________ *GSP (Girl Street Photographers) MORE ON SZILVIA and STELA
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Colours of Rome
There is "Rosso Veneziano" and "Gialo Napolitano" and all the shades of a country blessed by a superb light. And then there is Rome. “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightening rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” - Italo Calvino, Cities and Memory 3, Invisible Cities Elisa is venerating Rome and captures the colour and the smell of a city bathing in clay's ochre. But most of all she captures the many moods of its inhabitants in a masterful way, worthy of Calvino's invisible city (it is no secret that all Italo's cities were in fact one). Why then the B&W picture? Because, among other, in art photography we are looking for the ambiguous, the unstable, the doubt. Once a street loses its authoritative colours, there remains nothing but the glance, the gaze, the divine touch of the inhabitants. Similarly to Rome's oscillating correlation between inhabitants, physical site and cultural context, Elisa here explores the instability of the connexion between viewer, visual narration and physical context. And she is doing it in the most honest way, by dignifying her subjects with her attention. They are now touched by pathos. 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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