When we discover vision (healed blind people testimony) the first and only thing we see is just the light. All the rest is a mental construction … a learning.
We learn to see, to interpret, to represent. That is why an "imperfect" image takes us back to the beginnings, and as such, it is intriguing, with full of potential and unlimited interpretations. Walking through Koushik's image is a pleasure but most of all it is a proof that we need symbols, reference points, structure and even religion; don't get me wrong, only to dismantle them ! We need stairways to the unknown, we desire geometry in our mysteries, we are compelled by obscurity to hide from the materiality. And last but not least, we understand the author's undeclared wish to isolate parts of his vast world, to hide the multitude of elements which are appearing endlessly in his homeland "picture scroll'. More on Koushik Sinha Roy
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In a modern industrial world … (strike back, take it from the top) ...
In the modern post-industrial world of digital photography … (strike out) … In a crisp sharp world of utterly focused imaging, does still exist the attenuated elegance of the abstract? And the oneiric, precarious balance of a fading contrast, can still hold its place among hyperrealist creations? The answer is to be found (and lost again) in the two presented pictures of Corneliu. The shapes are the sole protagonists of his expressive work, but what these pictures really are about? The approximation of the dream, the "almost" (le presque), can be dreadful according to R.Barthes. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that this very incompleteness can be photography's only hope to survive the lethal disorder created by the deluge of photographers and their digital captures of the obvious. The "almost" of Corneliu's work cannot be explained in a short blog entry, as this one has been proposed to be. However, if we only let the pictures' child to guide us through his surroundings before and after his "placement", his posing for the sake of breaking the time continuum, then we may recognise that in fact these are our own childhood pictures. Our own stolen, granted or missed childhood, now only visible through these old prints, found in a box, pasted in an album, and then ignored over and over again in a Sisyphean struggle for resolving life and death. More on Corneliu Sarion There are two elements in the Balkans that make them contradictory and fascinating.
The voluntary and fatalistic attachment to the past, and at the same time the openness and the almost naive adoption of the modern. This is serving utterly the surrealism, opposing change and transforming the otherwise trivial scenes into a feast of oddities. In the present image, Koudelka's visual heritage is skilfully mixed with the unavoidable presence of car industry's excess. The author is using an acrobatic fragmentation of the scenery in multiple frames in frame (car's door, window, mirror) to symbolise the fragmentation of a society into individual and lonely figures, where even the trees rarely survive. More on Svilen Nachev An ode to the … illuminati of photography (is an oxymoron in itself since the light is essential here).
"This new situation has created an army of photographers who run rampant over the globe, photographing objects of all sorts, sizes, and shapes, under almost every condition, without ever pausing to ask themselves, is this or that artistic?… They spy a view, it seems to please, the camera is focused, the shot taken! There is no pause, why should there be? For art may err but nature cannot miss, says the poet, and they listen to the dictum. To them, composition, light, shade, form and texture are so many catch phrases.…" I am just trying to describe today's state of photography; or am I? Could be that I am just protesting? Well, welcome to the army of perpetual protesters because the above text was written in 1893, i.e. more than 120 years ago. (E. E. Cohen) The conclusion is that as much as the "dangers" or the "shallowness" of photography are concerned, these are one more of life's revolving, circular afflictions. When all seem to come to a, more or less, happy end, we are back to square one. The established society watched in terror the poor having too an image of their ancestors. Even the most remote talent could emerge in the "big town" without even stepping out of his backyard. Is the negative space fear coming from a rather primary concern of representing something that cannot be recorded? And why fight, in this case, against an absence which vests unmistakably a meaningful presence? We don't make a photograph. We take one! It is the process of selection and not of synthesis (resolving a scene rather than composing it). The image by Raluca Furtuna is not presented here to reflect the text. Her vision is not connected to any school or aesthetics. Her vision comes from working with the "thing itself", from engaging her skill of choosing and eliminating, and from acknowledging that time is not continuous but made out of personal crescendos, including visual ones. 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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