We couldn’t understand this project without first asking ourselves the question whose answer gave rise to the project itself. Is there something that we may know through photography? Is there any truth to the images that our eyes are subjected to on a daily basis?
There was a time when photography was established as the means par excellence to depict reality. We were told that whatever appeared in front of the camera was actually real, almost as if we were directly stealing a little piece of life, of history. As time went by, however, we have come to realize the danger of such a statement, which whilst partly true, it entails too many shades to be that categorical.
Indeed, what it appears on a photo it is usually real, it can be touched or it has been somewhere at some point. Nevertheless, to what extent is it real to prepare a scene to photograph it later? To what extent may some shot of 0.125 seconds show us the reality of a particular moment of life? Can we see somebody’s soul on a picture? All these questions just lead to more questions over and over again.
I personally think that reality can actually be seen through photography but not in the photograph as something physical. What I mean is that an image can evoke plenty of emotions which may not be necessarily related to the subject portrayed. Taking a picture (in Cartier-Bresson’s case, the purest photography) is so instantaneous, so brief that it can hardly represent perfectly every aspect of the situation being photographed. Let’s imagine for one moment that life is a succession of images passing through at full speed, like a movie. A picture would be an only frame of that movie. If we are skilful we may choose the frame which best evokes what is happening. However, the situation going on will probably be more complex.
From this point, we could state that photography, objectively, has its own limitations (like everything does). Nevertheless, if we understand those limitations as something inherent to photography, something meaningful or something that determines photography, we grant it at the same time one of the characteristics that can’t be shared with any other means of expression.
As I said, for me the camera is the only means of expression able to depict so much with so little. Listening to an instant of an opera (a note) or reading a word of a book will never reach the power of a photographic instant.
Photography like the microscope of reality. What appears so rapidly before our eyes entails much more than we think. We can remove particles from those realities that are infinitely interpretable. With this in mind, I start taking photos of everything that surrounds me, like a seeker trying to find what my eye can’t see but that I can know from the world thanks to my machine. I look for the motif and decide when I want to press the shutter button, which would be impossible without a camera.
The constant search for lost moments, like souls in the Styx, for lost instants in many situations, for images subject to being captured but which escape in continuous flow. I become a compulsive observer of the world that surrounds me.
When I develop a photo I contemplate my booty and with it I rebuild a meaningful reality that, in many cases, it has nothing to do with that past moment. In some way I turn into Little Thumbling who leaves marks on his way so he never forgets were he comes from. However, when it is time to return, all those marks have disappeared; they have taken a new meaning. All those breadcrumbs have lost now, through time, their original meaning; the moment they were meant to be a trace. In some way those breadcrumbs have become into something different once they are together. When we collect them, they interact with each other (something magical of the photographic fact), they draw a new path, this time a yellow brick road, which take me personally to a new world; a hideous world of unconnected particles of life.
It is a close photography the kind of photography that brings to our minds a familiar feeling, even if we don’t appear on it or even if it is not a picture of a known situation. What binds us together as human beings. The magic of a photograph.
A parallel world is created and it is built over a cornerstone between real and unreal. Real because what appears has been part of reality at some point. Unreal because, as I mentioned before, it is an instant so tiny and inestimable that at first sight it borders the unreal. It is very difficult that one hundredth of a second of history may tell so much. It may evoke but not tell.
In my photographs I try to investigate all this. I look for a bigger reality within reality, a moment so instantaneous that it can only be seen through the camera. Indeed, once the photo has been developed.
With my photos I try to transmit feelings but, in general, not the same sensations felt on that moment. I try something beyond this. Something that I wouldn’t be able to perceive if it wasn’t through photography. This is the reality that I want to find. The exclusively photographic instant.
Therefore a real world can be created from unreality.
There is people that says things like “I like them because they represent your life” about my photography. However, this is not completely true. I take pictures of my life, of what is going on around me but, in fact, you cannot see my life through my pictures. What you can see are glimpses of life: a relation between the photographed subject and the photographer, with everything that this statement encompasses.
LaFlamme