November 2008
The recording capability and artistic value of photography are two components that cannot be denied. However, its most characteristic peculiarity is the ability to escape from any unilateral interpretation or from any exclusive entrapment, serving or producing visual and cognitive illusions precisely through its apparent contradictions.
Those who have been engaged with photography for years, especially at times when the artistic world turned its back on it, knew that any aphorism about it could easily be reversed. Everything was valid and nothing was definitive. The materiality of the print and the intangibility of the image, craftsmanship or mechanical reproduction, narration or description, movement or stillness, truth or verisimilitude, form and randomness, uniqueness and repetition, shadows and colors, the camera or the photographer, the time of capture and the time of display, the space of the image and the space around it, and many more, all had their significance, yet at the same time, none was sufficient and nothing was absolutely clear. Photography as a medium had the intelligence to understand that its richness was based on its poverty. And that its final composite result had a self-sufficiency and autonomy that surpassed any analytical attempt of its sources. Thus, the greatest virtue of older photographers was that they learned to take seriously a medium that eluded them, while fortunately, society had protected them from taking themselves too seriously.
However, the fashion of photography, like every trend, does not tolerate challenges, subtractions, transgressions, and ambiguities. Therefore, the two most highlighted values of photography mentioned above quickly became absolute and exclusive, marking two directions that are quite simplistic and at the same time convenient: the photographer who captures the world by "shooting" it with his camera and the photographer who does not capture the world because he "paints" it with his camera. The former adopts or usurps the glory of the committed and sensitive fighter, and the latter the aura and the social and economic status of the visual artist.
Moreover, society, meaning in simpler terms our acquaintances, those with any power, theorists, and above all, people of the Press, favor clear terms and even clearer definitions. The words "photography" and "photographer" have always accompanied and expressed not so much the multiple applications of the medium as the polysemy of its essence. Hence, they are considered today from useless to suspicious.
The above two dimensions (recording and artistic) are significant through their denial. On one hand, the artistic values of photography cannot be detached from the "illusion" of truth and reality, and on the other, its recording capabilities do not exist without the "illusion" of a personal choice of form and composition. In short, for a photograph, there is no truth outside the "lie" of its overt and always forefront composition. But the composition is nonexistent when detached from the always hidden, suggestive, and ambiguous "truth" of the depicted. If this is not understood, then no photograph can have value. And the photographer who is neither a reporter nor a painter will always attempt to fish for an illusory significance, fishing on the margin of the visual world and on the surface of events, ignoring or underestimating the quest for the photographic "illusion".
Plato Rivellis