Portrait screen

Portrait Screen intends to investigate, through a particular use of photography, the historical imagery produced by film culture. The theoretical intent of the work is to push photography (portrait photography in particular) where, for reasons of time, it could not exist. The camera is here used as a "magic” tool, a box of wonders, a time machine able to portray and narrate: figures, characters, episodes and moments that, given their timing in history, have had no knowledge of photography and its wonders. Because of their importance, however, they have been narrated through the cinema (and its powerful industry) that has inevitably changed their image so as to create real cultural spectra from which we can hardly depart. The work aims to make a significant rewrite and description of this imaginary, specifically exploiting the very formal typological characters that only a culture intended to communicate on a large scale, like the cinema, could have achieved. The images produced are visually confused, the subjects are elusive, obscure, portrayed while escaping or blurring. At times the images seem to take shape, being characterized by signs of Baconian formal-pictorial values. The formal result, however, is nothing more than what happens when transforming and recording a fragment of a video image through a photographic medium. Only the visual essence of each image remains and is recorded on the photo while everything that is not essential to the story disappears during recording.