To Vima (To Vima Ideas insert, 2007)
Increasingly popular and ever simpler, photography remains inherently difficult and evidently misunderstood. Those who engage seriously with it need to search primarily in its schizophrenic nature, which constantly negates and overturns every previous certainty about its characteristics and practice.
The problems begin with defining the identity of the photographer. Who is a photographer, since almost everyone takes photos? What defines the special relationship of a person with photography and what distinguishes them from the average citizen, when the latter photographs almost daily, even with their mobile phone? And if the professional photographer's status is defined by a tax code, that of the artist or serious amateur is much harder to define and especially to differentiate from every person who, for various reasons, photographically captures the world around them.
The contradictions continue with a photographer's transition from the role of a memory recorder to that of a creator. The former captures significant life events with his lens. The latter realizes that what is important is the trivial, that the details are what should speak for the whole, and that the more significant the event itself, the more insignificant its photographic representation risks being.
But even the memorial photograph, from a stimulus of memory, becomes an autonomous bearer of memory, at the moment we realize that the family album's photos no longer preserve the years of our youth but replace them and become our memory themselves. The photograph of our father ultimately takes the place that his image had in our mind.
And as if all this were not enough, the photographer of vague identity realizes that he is driven by equally vague intentions, since while he is called to immortalize reality, in essence, he does nothing but transform it. He quickly realizes that what the photograph renders is a new reality that has been transformed by the intermediary presence of the photographer himself. The postmodern worship of reality may have deified photography in our times, but it slips away, revealing that its value lies in the photographed event and not the event itself, and that all things, people, and events are transformed once photographed.
Furthermore, if we move from the already vague and contradictory space of photographic identity and intentions to that of the photographic process, we encounter an even greater chain of schizophrenic contradictions. First of all, photographic transformation occurs mainly due to the separation (and the way of separation) of a part of reality from the overall visual field that the photographer's eyes see. The act of separation turns the photographic frame into a knife that dissects reality. While the photographer focuses on what is contained within the frame, he is actually dealing with what he will exclude. Since the real events or objects contained in the photographic frame existed before the photographer's intervention, his crucial contribution lies in what he excluded. Therefore, the content of the photograph is indirectly determined by what the photographer does not show.
But even the technical means that constitute photography's creative arsenal, while invented for the precise capture of reality, ultimately lead to its distortion. For example, we focus accurately and choose the appropriate apertures to have something clearly imprinted in our photograph. However, with this action, we consciously reject entire parts of reality and render them blurry and indistinct, even though our eyes see them clearly and distinctly. We use the incredibly fast speed of the camera's shutter, a fraction of a second, to speak of stillness, since that is the goal of the photograph. We choose a shooting angle hoping to make it decisive and absolute, while knowing that what we will depict can be captured from countless different angles that would provide correspondingly different views.
However, those photographers who are not enchanted by the untruth of transformation and the mystery of stillness, but seek the precise truth of what is depicted, quickly realize that this lies more in the captions of the images and in our preconceived notions about what they contain, rather than in what the photograph shows, which ultimately reveals only what we want and are ready to see.
Where, then, do all these schizophrenic contradictions of the photographic medium stem from? Perhaps from the fact that the essential content of a photograph is the description of a part of space within a moment in time. A time and a space that are eternally changing. Photography comes to emphatically certify the relativity of these two dimensions, through the simple fact that a new photographic time and space are born from those that the photographer captures. The still photographic spacetime continues unchanged alongside the continuous transformation of the real spacetime that generated it. The photographic click simultaneously creates, verifies, and negates time and space. And the photographic contradictions help us realize that time and space move simultaneously outside and beyond their existence."
Plato Rivellis