There is no objective truth in photography. The image is never more than a fragment of reality, a truncated, momentary, and incomplete point of view. The image is subjective, and its truth is always multiple, like that of the observer, or unfathomable, like that of the artist.
If there is such a thing as a “photographic truth”, it is to be found in its fundamental elements: light, composition, and optical device.
I have therefore attempted, inspired by the simplified form of the haiku and the mechanical honesty of Man Ray’s rayographs, to imagine an aesthetic that would stem solely from the photographic form itself.
The invisible cliché
Our sense of vision is a powerful, sophisticated, and rapid process, to the point of seeming instantaneous to us. However, it unfolds in several stages: the visual cortex first decodes shapes, textures, and colors, then it assesses depth and movement. The resulting image is then compared with those stored in memory to identify its content.¹
Imagine for a moment a photograph of the Taj Mahal: this easily recognizable image will be quickly dismissed, since it merely confirms the plausibility of our existing memory. It is a cliché, an image so predictable that it becomes almost invisible.
Conversely, a difficult-to-identify image will force the visual cortex to revisit it in order to extract new associations. The cortex will then focalize on the spatial relationships between the different elements of the image, such as lines, surfaces, and colors. This new reading, freed from its utilitarian role, allows an open and immediate interpretation of the image.
Escaping language
It is within this brief interval that I situate the photographs in American haiku and in Walking with Daidō: they stem from raw perception far more than from realistic description.
My intention here, despite the “realism” inherent in photography, is to create autonomous images, images that function on their own without being the representation of anything else.
To achieve this, one could not resort to techniques such as montage or illustration without distorting the nature of photography. Instead, I attempt to shift the viewer’s gaze, moving it from a predictable field, marked by automatic patterns, to an intuitive space that calls upon the viewer’s interpretation.
If the photographic image eludes language, it is because it operates at the most basic level of perception, prior to any coding². Its strength lies in its capacity to convey an unmediated sensory experience, similar to our organic perception of the world. ◼︎
- Eline Feenstra, How does our brain create a coherent image when we look at different objects?, Netherlands institute for neuroscience, April 2023 [read article]
- Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image, in Communications no 4, 1964 [read l’article]
