Brent Corrigan Regret

Clues photographic memory (2)

Carmelo Bongiorno, Erice

I return to my inventory for clues after a short break in Sicily which provided, inter alia, on further reflection.

pictures intimate memory

In

previous post I mentioned Corot and his memory of places. I wonder: what kind memory has painted? That memory is represented by Corot intimate, private, arising from personal portraits of places. It 's a memory complex to be represented, because wrapped in a kind of opacity that the viewer can not be removed completely. To diminish this leans on the opacity of the representation power evocative image, with the use of scattered clues in order to turn on the intuition of the audience, to stimulate their imagination. Sharpening and color are signs of alteration (among other possible) left to direct the viewer's mind than the apparent surface: indicators of the invisible.

A beautiful collection of these indicators emotional , photographic evidence of memory I've collected in an early work of the photographer Catania Carmelo Bongiorno , Island intimate (1997). In his photographs Bongiorno staged an incredible variety of visual equivalents of the private memory :

- the fuzzy (example: 01. Stretto di Messina ; 07. Cefalù )

- the breaking of the minimum focusing (03. Catania 17. Portopalo )

- the use of highly evocative depth of field, as in intense Erice or 12. Noto. [The numbers refer to that present in the author's website].

All this is then summed up the choice of style, very important, to photograph in black and white , with a renunciation of the accuracy of the color that best results both visually dazzling light of the violence of the South (and its memory) is the sense of distance and elusiveness that each private memory port, unavoidable, in itself.

In this type of memory intimate is a counterpoint to another kind of memory, external, more visible: the fact that many fragments they carry in more or less stratified. Objects, places, buildings, faces and bodies on which they are filed with the traces of time and they live together, more or less visibly. Another type of memory and other types of images, which will be the next post.

(continued)

Maxine Cartoons Birthdays

Clues photographic memory (1) lake

Corot, remember Mortefontaine (1864)

Making photography in the sense of memory? Which signals to use image to represent the intertwining of different times that stratified often live in our eyes? I try to draw, from this post, a partial and provisional inventory visual equivalents to the viewer that indicate the presence of a time "other" than this photo.

Looking for a paradigm

An important example is found in painting Camille Corot (1796-1875). Corot, after painting landscapes en plein air, begins to paint landscapes in the studio, using no more than direct observation, but the memory places. In these "memory paintings" in the title of the sites have a concrete and precise topographic ( remember Mortefontaine; The clearing memory of Ville d'Avray ), but are made using two techniques that aim, however, to achieve a final effect of imprecision, almost the image of instability: the soft focus (or focus "soft"), and alteration of colors. These two are perhaps the way that we might take as initial models for the rendering of visual memory paradigms that photography and cinema have often adopted and still use it. With soft focus the entity and its edges lose definition, with the discoloration (usually a desaturation) is the color of the subject to become unstable, losing clarity, the effect of distance similar to that produced by the gradient of "aerial perspective" already observed by Leonardo.

Quello che Corot ci ha lasciato in eredità, dal punto di vista delle tecniche di rappresentazione della memoria, è il senso di lontananza che il ricordo porta in sé, una lontananza che non appartiene allo spazio, ma al tempo. E ciò che è lontano nel tempo trova una possibile manifestazione visiva nell'imprecisione del disegno e nella inafferrabilità del colore. Un paradigma attivo da almeno due secoli.

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