Camera Obscura

3d reconstruction of the installation Infinite Cube City.

Last week I finally put online some files of the photos infinite palaces and buildings from my series of repetitive elements. Photos on which I worked for more than one year and that I have repeatedly cited writing on this blog. At the same time I published on Camera Obscura a brochure showing one of the installations that can be made starting from these giant photographs of buildings.

This is Infinite Cube City (pdf, 2.0Mb), a cube of 3m where the walls are built precisely using a photo of the series: the palace near Place d’Italie.

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Photoshop can turn a pics into a pencil or pen drawing.

It’s been a long time since I first tried to convert pictures into drawings, or more precisely, since I first tried to define a procedure that allows the simulation of a charcoal, pencil, blood drawing from a picture.

The majority of the online tutorials use automatic Photoshop filters, that I personally consider awful, both artistic, stylization and border identification ones. Images always seem a little bit artificial, the artistic technique they refer in reality are really different, you always notice it’s a filtered picture and not a real drawing and all of those images are extremely similar to each others. It is recommended to work with your own two hands, more than entrust an automatic system.

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Yangon fish market

© Paola Casali

On Camera Obscura pages, as in many interventions about photography spread around both the virtual and the real world, I insist on the fact that pictures don’t necessary have a mimetic relationship with reality. Being an icon is one of the possible characteristics of photography, but absolutely not the most fundamental and constitutive.

Although this, photography is often iconic, and that was the characteristic that initially attracted me, the first time that I took a camera in my hands to impress what surrounded me, without saying anything about symbols, icons and index. Despite all I learnt after that, the narrative possibilities of photography still live in me: showing an angle of a distant world, people, things, lost paradises. Therefore reportage, even though Camera Obscura mostly talks about fine art photography, is one of my biggest passion ever.

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Contemporary art and photo in Barcelona. From top left, clockwise: Mito, 3 punts, Carles Taché and Camara Lucida.

I just got back from a week in Barcelona dedicated to the research of a contemporary art or photo gallery that can represent me in the Catalan. It was my first time ever in Barcelona, therefore I had to learn something about the city, understand where expositive center and galleries were located, appreciate the atmospheres and taste the districts. This article is a resume about the experiences made last week that can be used to prepare an itinerary for those who are searching for a space to expose or for those who simply wants to visit art and photo galleries in Barcelona. The emphasis, because of my motivations, is posed on photo or contemporary art galleries that are potentially interested to bet on young photographers.

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Van Dyke Brown print cyanotype on Arche Platine paper. Analogical negative with interpositive on paper.

A couple of years ago, while I was traveling by car in the south of Italy, I was talking with a friend from Naples, photographer himself, about alternative print techniques. In particular, I was talking about superimposing brown prints, or Van Dyke brown, to cyanotype prints.

The answer was quick and laconic:

- Blue and brown is not allowed! (NT: in Italian the rhyme goes with a word that means rude, boor)

There’s also the twin proverb to complete the opera: “black and brown never allowed”.

In reality, superimposing iron salts brown print on cyanotype is a technique, as every technique, that could be interesting, mostly when printing the hardest negatives or to recover bad VDB prints. This phrase could be rude, but actually in alternative techniques world it is better to let yourself go, letting destiny play its trickeries, leaving space to serendipity and accepting what fate will give to you. Those who work with this kind of prints are used to it to discover an alternative look, produce different images to the ones we’re used to, create unique prints. This is the reason why there’s nothing better than case or, if we want, chaos.

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Poster of the movie Paysages manufacturés (Manufactured Landscapes) by Jennifer Baichwal, a documentary about the work of Edward Burtynsky.

It’s been quite a long time since I haven’t gone to the cinema and I took the chance to watch Manufactured Landscapes by Edward Burtynsky before it would have disappear from the Parisian cinemas.

I had a positive impression in the complex. The documentary flows pleasantly, with some fluid stock phrases of the author, diaporama of his pictures, preparation of each shot, external interventions, and dialogs with people encountered around.

Some passages leave me in a quandary.

For example Edward Burtynsky affirms more than once that his work doesn’t bring to any judgment, any political critic, any position, anything. This would move the sense of the opera to the pure documentary. The artistic value as surplus would be taken from the fact that art is the amplifier of the human perception, turning into possible a revaluation of reality far from the subjective opinions.

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Zone plate A3 inkjet print, 2008. In order to properly appreciate the grain of the image it is necessary to see the print, because the reduced resolution necessary for web publication creates a false perception of the image.

The photographs obtained using a zone plate in place of an objective, like pinhole photos, undergo significant digital noise and have a distinct character in comparison to that present on normal photographs obtained with an objective.

A zone plate is definitely more luminous than a pinhole, but remains anyway much less luminous than a traditional objective; therefore you often use the high sensitivity of the camera and/or lengthy exposure times. The images obtained are also very soft not only in terms of detail, but also contrast. Often therefore you apply levels and contrast curves in Photoshop in order to give energy to the photograph, while simultaneously amplifying the digital noise present in the image.

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Without title, 2000.
© Gilles Berquet

The pictures of Gilles Berquet are a trip into the obscure world of the eroticism, without forgetting sadomasochism, bondage, pissing, strange machines and perversions. In general, I do like all of them and I do not have any kind of prejudice or refusal towards porn pictures. I do appreciate those who explore their ghosts and their own perversions, offering them to the world. But the majority of his images, from the photographic point of view, don’t strike me in a particular manner. In some cases I can’t see further than a woman with her leg open and a jet of pee flying into the air.

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