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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