Between Gaze and Hallucination

Description

The mass popularisation of photography and of the taking of photographs has drastically reduced our chances of being aware, camera in hand and ready to snap, of the truly telling moment. Or, looking at it in another way, telling moments have become so utterly commonplace that only genuinely exceptional circumstances can reveal them.

So, we need to add new criteria to our assessment of photography; criteria that we must reinvent. And we find ourselves seesawing between a few iconic photographs, the ones that keep tabs on our lives and a jumbled multitude of other images that, despite everything, are just there throughout our normal everyday lives, even when they no longer portray our gaze rationally, morphing, instead, into representations of our emotions and hallucinations.

How far can we draw out this gaze of ours? To what extent can we sketch the actual boundaries of a specific time, when there is no contextualised “before” and no foreseen “after”. Will we have free rein to transform this gaze into a wandering image; one that has no past and, even worse, no memory but, despite this, is somehow of significance? This project has been shaped in the crucible of such reflections. It takes the form of a sequence of simple clips.

Some are incidental, but all have been snapped in that unexceptional world in which we pursue our daily lives. All the images are black and white, intentionally and emotionally charged, so they may avoid the distraction of colour and the pressure of any form of modernness.

The work that involved fixing and compressing fragments that lie within the reach of all but which perhaps go unnoticed when “descried” as part of the normal flow of our busy lives. Perhaps this is how they can be interpreted and interrelated, in a different and emancipated manner, with the detachment that is the assumed privilege of the free.