Paolo Ventura - Winter Stories

 

 

 

There are strange lost worlds, whispering under the eaves and in rooms always kept closed, footfalls and distant voices, almost heard, reminiscence living as the dream lives inside the dreamer. When winter comes we think of spring again, of brighter days; winter is the closing season, and if this work is by no means unique in its conception, its nostalgia, there are few photographers that so effectively create a world as Paolo Ventura does, certainly not with the emotional resonance he manages here. Of course these scenes, inside (and outside) of time, are studio fictions, elaborated in every detail by Ventura himself – nothing left to chance, agonising over the ideal vantage point, the quality of light, colour palette; their illusion is deft, but self-conscious. Attention to the pictures, our “reading” of them, flickers between the complete (and gratifyingly detailed) apparent reality that each sustains and the realisation that the pictures are a visual slight of hand – a trick of memory, the coherence of which obviously dissolves on closer inspection: memory cannot be trusted. It is this tension in looking at the images that makes them so effective, how he positions them right on the edge of believability and never any further, never making them real worlds in the kind of cinematic way that other artists have done. There are entirely contained narrative reveries, meaning of course that their world is contained, because the images have a fascinatingly open-ended quality, as if these fragments could indeed be your own memories, had circumstance been different, that you might have lived other lives, in other places, all knotted together with the present. If it is not a life that has been lived, then it is a life that could have been lived.To see more of Ventura’s Winter Stories – and his other series War Souvenir – visit his website.

Yaniv Waissa

 

 

 

Yaniv Waissa addresses how collective memory and the politics of a society gets inextricably tangled up with the physical reality, the fabric, of a place, the forces that shape where we live and how, showing the routines of space we inhabit – or are inhabited by even, how certain attitudes, and our histories, are manifested in the structures we create. Yet there is a real sense of contingency in the pictures, at odds with the ambition underlying the monumental works they depict (along with their political realities) that suggests a potent allegory of national uncertainty behind the dry, measured appearance of the pictures themselves. Waissa has produced a diverse range of work, all circling around the same broad themes of memory and place, but this project Disintegration of a Revived Nation is maybe his most accomplished to date. You can see the rest of it online here.

Gerald Slota

It's surprising that even still we regard pictures as being discrete little rectangles of visual experience, which to certain extent of course they are, but the more fundamental problem is with how narrow our conception of photographic reality so often is, habitually confused with mere resemblance and not the multiple, discontinuous overlay of memory and presence we actually live. Gerald Slota's work is inherently photographic, it conjures an interior reality from the materials themselves, in this case old negatives bought at an estate sale. Something about it reminds me of Roger Ballen, which might seem a bit unlikely given how different this is in terms of both style and execution, but the knowing primitivism of his "drawing" on the negatives, the brittle, fevered intensity of the resulting images, suggests something of the same private world Ballen works with, a haunted psychological landscape, albeit one arising from the "lost time" of the photographs and how he works them. A large selection of Slota's work can be found on his website.

Ken Rosenthal

 

Ken Rosenthal’s work could easily be dismissed as overly precious or sentimental, but the acute sense of fragility in these photographs, scenes falling from the slip-stream of memory, into thin air – into nothing, seems surprisingly tough-minded, even bleak, despite the ethereal quality of the pictures, which in fact capture that tenuous point of erasure just before the corrosion is absolute, a vanishing reality – unmade as it is formed, not quite frozen by the camera, it remains liquid, malleable, flowing through the pictures, the archetypes of presence. More work can be found on his website.

Begin Again: Some Thoughts on Writing and Photography

I’ve decided to make some changes, expose the unfinished thought. Meaning is not fixed, not locked into the image, and really you don’t write just about pictures, you write around them, in lengthy detours, botched experiments; it’s a side-long glance, oblique fragments never making a comprehensible pattern, but almost and often that’s enough to open the mystery, its catalyst. The worst thing is to assume you have an answer. Everything here is provisional anyway, drafts of drafts, second chances. The only kind of writing that interests me is a high-wire act, right on the edge of failure, of incoherence even, whatever is left, whatever is scattered and not whole. So don’t tell me what you mean – I don’t want to know, and why would you think it matters? Even the post-conceptual standard of intention over gesture, an art of galleries where nothing is at stake, can certainly cherish indeterminacy, or seem to at least, but won’t always risk the deeper, more profound chaos that flows under carefully ordered surfaces, with things half seen, half remembered, the dream-life of reality. We never lived in sign-systems or outside of them, but in improvised leaps between the points of light in an otherwise darkened landscape and there is no theory for that, no position to articulate, just the strange music of intuition, not knowing how far it will take you – if anywhere at all, but willing none the less, to draw back the curtain. The absent spaces between the image and what you had intended: this makes the art. Criticism can – or rather it should – open up these spaces, make them legible. That’s all… Of course, what you see is never only what you see; layers of meaning, moving through the image, in eclipses and contradictions, blind-spots. You don’t need the key, but only describe the experience of looking, in all its complexity, in maddening circles, a dialogue between the artist (in the work they’ve made, though probably not in what they think of as their intention) and you, on the outside looking in. Sometimes the chemistry works and then sometimes it doesn’t, when there is no recognition, no sense of being complicit. To separate the piercing, urgent, valuable photographs from the dross is always a calculated risk, but seeing through is what matters, to cross the border into some unprompted meaning, into what is possible, to begin again. In finding why some photographs matter and others do not, it is significant too that there is some fugitive rationale for all of this, a context, if you are not to fumble along in the dark, getting endlessly lost. We have few reliable maps, but it’s true that not all pictures carry or sustain a weight of meaning. To justify this interrogation there are the ones that last, that draw you back time and again, doubtful but always challenged. Lasting art (and its criticism by turn) is an equation that won’t be solved, but only followed intact – a confrontation with the mystery of appearances.