hipsta.self
Hipsta.nothing
“Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.” This concept seems written today, but it dates back to 40 years ago (Susan Sontag - On Photography - 1973), and in the smartphone era it has taken even greater power. Recently James Estrin, journalist and photographer from the New York Times, wondered in his NYT blog, "Lens", about which effect the modern "tsunami" of photography could have. Estrin speaks about the billions of mobile phones with camera taking pictures of everything (food, children, dogs, sunsets, feet, art, monuments and other), which shoot so many actions as if they all have equal importance. Every single day on Facebook more than 380 million photos are loaded, and Instagram is growing exponentially with 4 billion photos uploaded up to July 2012. Always for Estrin “A photograph is no longer predominantly a way of keeping a treasured family memory or even of learning about places or people that we would otherwise not encounter. It is now mainly a chintzy currency in a social interaction and a way of gazing even further into one’s navel”.
As an artist I did not want to put myself above others, therefore I did not make (as Joan Fontcuberta did in his work) a collection of web images to be used in my project, but I put myself on the same level of common "users". I identified, researching on the web, the most photographed subjects and then I started to photograph them in my dailylife. To do this I used an iphone application (Hipstamatic) in which you can use 1054 different effects (at the moment but they are constantly expanding) created by the combination of 34 types of "virtual" film and 33 "virtual" lenses. For each subject, I took 54 photographs, each time changing the effect but keeping the same shot; then I assembled them into panels with a clear POP aesthetics inspiration.
The final work consists in 972 photographs (18 panels of 54 photographs each), through which I aimed at getting a sensory effect to dive deep into the chaos of images that repeat themselves into a stupor and whose subjects represent a sort of "nothing", but at the same time aesthetically treating the final effect up to perfection. The result is a short circuit which is that of our society, squeezed between the exasperation of aesthetics and the paucity of content.
This is the selfportrait pannel.
“Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.” This concept seems written today, but it dates back to 40 years ago (Susan Sontag - On Photography - 1973), and in the smartphone era it has taken even greater power. Recently James Estrin, journalist and photographer from the New York Times, wondered in his NYT blog, "Lens", about which effect the modern "tsunami" of photography could have. Estrin speaks about the billions of mobile phones with camera taking pictures of everything (food, children, dogs, sunsets, feet, art, monuments and other), which shoot so many actions as if they all have equal importance. Every single day on Facebook more than 380 million photos are loaded, and Instagram is growing exponentially with 4 billion photos uploaded up to July 2012. Always for Estrin “A photograph is no longer predominantly a way of keeping a treasured family memory or even of learning about places or people that we would otherwise not encounter. It is now mainly a chintzy currency in a social interaction and a way of gazing even further into one’s navel”.
As an artist I did not want to put myself above others, therefore I did not make (as Joan Fontcuberta did in his work) a collection of web images to be used in my project, but I put myself on the same level of common "users". I identified, researching on the web, the most photographed subjects and then I started to photograph them in my dailylife. To do this I used an iphone application (Hipstamatic) in which you can use 1054 different effects (at the moment but they are constantly expanding) created by the combination of 34 types of "virtual" film and 33 "virtual" lenses. For each subject, I took 54 photographs, each time changing the effect but keeping the same shot; then I assembled them into panels with a clear POP aesthetics inspiration.
The final work consists in 972 photographs (18 panels of 54 photographs each), through which I aimed at getting a sensory effect to dive deep into the chaos of images that repeat themselves into a stupor and whose subjects represent a sort of "nothing", but at the same time aesthetically treating the final effect up to perfection. The result is a short circuit which is that of our society, squeezed between the exasperation of aesthetics and the paucity of content.
This is the selfportrait pannel.
Comments 5
leggendo il bando sei un bandito come me che ha usato uno mobile per misurarsi con linguaggio al di fuori dei loro canoni.
la quantita' d'immagini non copre l' idea di realizzazione
bravo ribravo
bravo
Ciao,
Lino
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