Analyse your personal laws before judging your choices and actions.
Since the beginning of this cathartic year, I’ve been in many different ways questioned by the concept of freedom.
Are we free when we look?
We depend on 75.000 years of sapiens visual tradition that are impossible to get out from our code. And even if we assume this fact and we are happy with it, it is hard to identify and isolate the roots of this tradition in order to look in the eye to the substance that remains and that could be called just ours.
So, I think we are not free at all. But, I am also convinced that there is a way to feel free when looking.
When I shoot, I don’t think much about it. I do not program it and I do not spend much time on the preparation. I don’t even use a tripod because I dont like to stay long concentrated on a view. I have this deterministic sense of urgency that prevents me of staying long on the same spot. It is just fun. I enjoy the liberating action of shooting without overthinking, shooting under the conquest impulse.
Instead, I do spend much time on analysing my pictures.
Once I have selected the best ones and finished the editing, I devote a lot of time on analysing what my pictures can tell me about myself. I find analysis liberating.
For instance, I discovered that this particular picture contained a clear reference to Vermeer palette. The same blue and the same golden-yellow as you can find in the Girl with a Pearl Earring or in The Milkmaid. I found it out days after my visit to the site.
There are elements in my photos that keep showing up again and again: the tangible light through the windows, the texture of the decayed painting, the decoration of the floors, the doorways that take nowhere, the coexistence of spaces, the broken symmetry, the intruder nature and off course the absence of the human figure… They are stubborn language signs that I try to encode every time.
My freedom, both shooting and analysing, is fictional, but I enjoy a lot to plunge on my creations and get a sniff on how my real self sees the world and then make an effort to look at it diferently.
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