Coming back to Cuba after three years, we soon developed
the idea for ”Ojos y Paciencia” with two friends and colleagues,
Julio and Sainz. None of us are photographers, but as visual artists,
the digital image appeals to us as an image-making tool and triggers curiousity.
It offers different interpretations connected to other artistic work,
as well as reflections on possible realities and of course is used as
photography in its own right.
The digital image is open to manipulation in many ways. This is nothing
new, skillful masters of the dark-room has known similar techniques. What
is new, is that the tools are so easily at hand and relatively easy and
fast to work with.
Susan Sontag says in her classic book ”On Photography” from
1979: A photography is not only an image (as a painting is an image),
an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly
stencilled of the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
This might still be true of digital photography, but the close relation
between reality and the image is even more problematic and ambigous.
We wanted to experiment with putting together representations of our realities
in digital images, all of them based on photography, but realized in different
visual languages.
Sainz’ work shows everyday situations in public space in an unusual
way. His work is not manipulated or staged in any way. Even so, these
very consciously framed and composed photos gives us a sense of an abstracted
reality, different from the noisy activity we know from the streets of
Havana. This impression is strengthened by his choice to produce the images
in black and white and by the subtle introspection we sense in his subjects.
Julio has chosen to turn the camera on the details of his main artistic
activity:print-making. The printed image is not present, only the traces
of ink and paint in different stages of the process: as potential and
as residue. We get impressions from a world of color and shape, depicted
as some kind of landscapes. Julio shows us a small, spesific part of the
reality connected to image-making.
Our own work consists of three posters, composed of images of publicly
well-known persons found on the Internet. The posters each belong to a
different genre of publicly available imagery: the filmposter, the news-shoot
and the celebrity- or fashion-photograph. The persons are constucted portraits,
each of them composed and layered from several originals. In a way, our
work is an investigation of what cn happen to the image in a mass-media
reality.