Analogue Photography
In the photo community in its whole, not just among professionals (vexata quaestio would also be how to define a professional photographer … anyway … ), it has become more interesting the role of film photography, extensively called analogue photography.
I am happy to share this little pearl of wisdom captured on the CNN channel
I am personally reintroducing in my professional documenting practice the use of film, it has actually been a process that started a few years ago and now I am still working on each project on how to fit together film and digital in a single stream of images.
The quality is different, it would be like an industrially made fabric and a handwoven one, the imperfections and the tridimensional depth of the latter makes it an inadmissible parallel.
I am not blaming the digital revolution, I use its immediacy for most of my commercial work, but I am happy and proud when I can hold a negative against the light to mentally convert the blacks into white, the dark areas into light areas and forsee the final image.
“Everything that is very simple it has to be sloppy you can’t be too sloppy in analogue photography because it takes time, it takes effort it takes concentration” – Elliot Erwitt -
Let’s share the imperfections and efforts of analogue photography, it’s about life.
Ellen and the art of …
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It was in the 90′s, when I was dating this girl, Valentina, she was an amazing person, my very first love, everything was a discovery, a new acquisition, love itself was new and fulfilling, like it never was after that. I lost contact with her, I have heard she is happily married, with two kids, I am happy for her.
It might seem that all is gone, but I am not quite sure, two things have remained after all these years, one is my love for photography, the other is the admiration for Mme Ellen Von Unwerth.
Valentina was a big fun of VOGUE magazine, she would buy every single copy of it, she wasn’t necessarily into fashion, but she definitely was into fashion photography, she would know the names of all the top models, by heart, and all the photographers too. She would tell me how much she loved Bruce Weber or Steven Meisel, or how classic and unbeatable was Helmut Newton‘s style and I agreed, but one really struck my heart: Ellen Von Unwerth.
I love her affection for smokey eyes, the fascination of the imperfect shot, the blurry and out of focus images.
In the book “Image makers, image takers” the artist states that she is still shooting film, given the fact that the book was published in 2007 we can possibly assume that something might have changed, though I still hope to see, in the future, more and more odes to imprecision. An aesthetic revolution.
Call it Style, Groucho, Fred and Gene
©KEVO.biz - Groucho - Fred - Gene
When I first entered the fashion world I found myself working for a great designer, to whom I owe a huge debt in gratitude, I was clueless, but he was patient and showed me the route towards the understanding of the fashion system and style. One of the first question he asked me was: “What is style for you?”
I was hopeless, but he and his wife gave an opportunity, I should have showed up a few days later with a bunch of drawings, at least forty drawings for a male total look, inspired on all the most important decades of the last century.
I remember working hard, in despair that all my efforts would have been useless, I had a real vague ideao of what style was, I could not really find the solution, so I worked twice as hard. My efforts were rewarded, the collection, after a severe selection by Maurizio Bonas, ended up in a mood board and eventually found it’s way to the production line.
After that first assignment I developed a sort of affection towards Maurizio and Sylvie’s commitment, I loved their work ethic, their passion, I would devour all the books, magazines, pieces of news they would deliver. That’s exactly the time I started to learn and love fashion.
Fashion as the expression of culture at its best, the summa of all the knowledge, not to mention the fact that Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver’s journeys what he points out, most of the time is the quality (good or bad) of the taylors of the populations his anti-hero might encounter. Fashion can be the voice of our culture.
Developing my taste was the second most interesting job, I found amusing that I had been exposed to good images of style since I was a little kid, all the American musicals, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and the idea of classy outfits, that was the time when the idea of elegance coming from Europe was meeting the necessary research of comfort that the American market was looking for.
I also put Groucho Marx in the number just because life has to be witty and who can represent that attitude better than Mr Marx? I loved his outfits during interviews and his sharp humor, without a smile, never vulgar, always a bit surreal.
Drawings
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It’s a method, widely investigated during the centuries, drawing was a tool used to understand reality, to simplify, to summarize reality on a piece of paper. It’s a fascinating brain process the one that gives us the ability to see and then translate through our hands.
Drawings have always followed me in my career, I always needed to previsualize the shots, to be able to explain to assistants, students and clients, what the project was all about, they helped me study the light set, being able to deduct the lightsources from the shadows I sketched on the paper.
Drawing is a meditative practice to me, if I am tuned with my inner self I am able to reproduce, if not, it’s going to be frustrating even holding a pencil, but even if you are not in the mood, such practice can channel all the erupting outputs on paper, in the attempt of combing the yarns in a well set up warp.
I need to draw once in a while to understand what I see in the magazines, shapes, volumes and trends need to be decomposed and synthetized to the essence, that’s why I love Gruau‘s art, or Lopez‘s or Litrico‘s, because their illustrations where the quintessence of fashion, a fashion Manifesto, they were understandable.
Unfortunately, in the last decade, fashion magazines has hosted less and less illustrators on their pages, outlining a progressive impoverishment of the photographic language, we are witnessing the growth of an autopoietic system as a dear friend of mine would iconically put it.
Almodovar – Los Abrazos Rotos
The last show at night, the best choice, there is no interruption and you can watch it from the beginning to the end, usually in an empty theater.
While writing these few lines I am watching the trailer over and over, the movie is like an attempt of analyzing the motion picture’s narrations techniques by showing how far it is from real life, the “pelicula” is so stuffed with threads that are left hanging, that more than once you ask yourself why has that element been added if in the end it wasn’t rethrived, concluded. Life doesn’t give time to indulge in poetic details, although we love to think so, or at least that’s the expectation we have when the lights are switched off and the projector lights up, Almodovar on the other end, shows the pettiness of humanity in front of the tragedy, the drama never really explodes, it’s subdued throughout the whole film, giving the impression that it’s just part of it, it’s with us.
The photography is connotated by a sort of flatness, emphasized by the use of huge paintings as backgrounds as well as selectiveley focused scenes and close ups, giving the idea of a suspended reality.
I will watch it again analizing it scene by scene, in it’s framing qualities. What I admire of this movie is its humbleness the role given to the “palabra”; the voice of Penelope Cruz, we loved and admired in many productions, resonate at its best in Spanish, as well as her unstable walking with high heels on cobbled paved streets.
The system used is so far from realism that only after, when we are digesting it we appreciate the employment of wigs in the movie, the idea of interchangeable identities, Almodovar suggests a reflection on the condition of modern men, concealed with a sense of acceptance, where the mask is a necessity, the search of a new perspective, through an alias is one of the systems utilized to survive in this world.
ARCHIVE – Cowboys and Photojournalists
Kenneth Jarecke gives a clear idea of the future of photography, although he is talking about photojournalism, his point can be applied to any field of the photographic world.
the whole article tries to answer a few questions:
“Is photojournalism dying? it’s golden era is gone, what can be the next step?”
the analogy with the cowboy mithology is hitting the target, a whole nation’s identity is based on a lifestyle that did not last more than 20 years.
People are still looking at the iconic identity of the photojournalist that was a direct product of magazines like LIFE and LOOK that did not last a lot longer than the cowboy’s lifestyle.
Click here to read the article on the New York Times website