Photographer Magazine 2008
When someone begins to engage in the art of photography, everything seems easy. However, if they wish to continue and delve deeper into it, they are obliged to reflect on the medium's uniqueness and to understand its characteristics.
- Photography is marked by its poverty. All photographs are humble and simple. Most are also insignificant. These latter contribute to the revelation of the few and rare ones which, while remaining humble and simple, manage to be significant.
- Photography is completed in two equally important stages. On the one hand, the capture and on the other, the selection, editing, and organizing. The necessary creative thinking must follow, not accompany, the capture.
- The technical ease and the dominant verbosity of photographic production must be counterbalanced with rigor and self-criticism, with spirituality and cultivation.
- Most people (and unfortunately, historians and other art experts too) treat photography with covert disdain and blatant ignorance. Another reason (among various others, more general) for the photographer to turn his creative ambition towards himself, in a fruitful confrontation with himself, and not towards others, in a suspicious transaction or a pointless competition with them.
Unfortunately, however, it is not rare for young photographers, hoping to escape their initial artistic dead ends, to attempt to overturn the above characteristics in various indirect ways.
- The most suitable way to achieve this is to shift the process of investing thought from the second stage to the first, or even before it. Thus, the photographic capture no longer constitutes the food for creative thought, but its illustration. Thought – let us not forget – is much easier than photography, accommodates ignorance without a problem, and, most importantly, is much more accessible to others.
- Related to the above method is the disturbance of the balance between the two stages. The stage of selection, organization, and editing then becomes the most important. Thus, the serving outshines the dish. This is also a way for photography to shake off its poor nature and heritage and attempt to become significant through an illusory wealth.
- However, one of the most popular and widespread methods is the complete denial of the medium's uniqueness and the simultaneous rejection of any other opinion about it. From thereon, there is nothing that must be respected, but also nothing that can serve as a basis for the edifice of creation. Thus, we can (finally) play on other fields, exploiting the ignorance of society and the experts. After all, these latter have invented a characteristic, as much as comical, term: the "post-medium condition" (sic, in post-Greek language). That is, the era where there are no "mediums". An era that has no (and does not want) criteria. The era that grinds in the same mill the capable and the incapable, with the sole condition being the acceptance of the condition and the rules of the (new) game.
All these methods (and many others not mentioned) testify that ambition ceases to be a creative motive, since it turns its back on the creator and photography and turns towards society and others, desperately begging for recognition, but also for emancipation from the (always poor) photography. Thus, however, the ease of photography, combined with the (post-medium) ignorance that surrounds it, will become the trap in which they will fall to be definitively lost the passion, the talent, and the innocence.
Plato Rivellis