Vendredi 03 Août 2012 15:13:22 par actuphoto dans Expositions

Notes about the manipulation of photography in Rodrigo Braga's work by Clarissa Diniz (copyright) The work of Rodrigo Braga, since the series Nail and Skin, has been marked by the digital manipulation of photography, a recurrent issue in the 20th and 21st centuries, when the limits between the real and the unreal became widely questioned, among other reasons, by the creation of new technologies. The appearance of photography provided by the possibility of accurate depiction of the world images, offered by the invention of an equipment - the camera - that, being sensitive to the manifestations of light, was able to apprehend the luminous variations of what was in front of it, reproducing them on a film, producing an equal image to the one captured by the lens at the moment of the photo. This history left deep marks on photography, that, to exist had always (up to the 20th century) to be associated with the presence of the object in front of the lens, so that the light that emanated from it could be seized and converted into image. This creation process of an analogue image gave to photography the character of an index, as if the image brought out by it was always the index of a reality that, at some moment, existed. Due to that, photography could not exist by itself, because, when regarding her, we wouldn't be in fact seeing her, but looking at her reference. However, with the advent of the digital image, a new possibility of depiction and construction of reality was created. Digital images are all numerically decoded, which, by obeying a numerical logic, can be produced by men, as happens with the image edition software that conceive objects instead of retracting them, so exempting the element of reference. In Braga's art, digital technology is used in order to make possible interference with real images, which exist already, adding a character that is not inherent in them. This detailed work (crafty, in the sense that it demands the control of the used skill) is executed with the aid of the computer, with an image edition program. It is not a successive application of effects over the image's surface, as if we put, over a classic image, doses of modernism, but a deeper alteration, as it modifies the original appearance, giving it a new one, and, therefore, a new identity. In the artist's words: I used to get bothered by the fact that the digital resources were being associated with photography only as a formal addition to the image captured by the lens, or even only as an exaggerated succession of applications of effects that merely reconstituted the pictorial tradition, that the pencil or the paintbrush have already been doing so well over centuries. I wanted, therefore, something that operated by the nearly imperceptible, something that subverted the index like character of photography, floating between the virtual and the tangible. I had the desire of generating not the characteristic surrealism of a photographic assemblage, but rather, to ´fabricate´ in a graphic digital ambient, a ´reality´ that, in some way, could have really happened, by means of human manual skill. This attempt to create reality is not new in the history of art, though it now takes another form. The illusion of reality that emerged with trompe l´oleil and with the invention of perspective, for example, claimed to make a depiction seem real, as happened with Zeuxis, who painted grapes that the pigeons tried to peek, while photographic manipulation deals with the sense of ´registration´ and ´memory´, not pretending that what we see on the paper is real, but that, in some or other context, it existed, and, is therefore, an image that can be indefinitely transformed. In this way, the image changes its nature, loses its transient reference to the real, to become a simulation whose reference is, now, a numerical equation calculated by a computer program. The use of technological resources permits Rodrigo Braga to deal with the limits between reality and unreality, producing the images of an agent provocateur, whose odd look and probable unreality contrast with its channel, photography - index of a reality. The spectator, confused, now questions himself not only about the reality of the image, but also about its (in)sanity. Moreover, as with the invention of the camera, what in fact changed was not only the way of representing images but also the manner of looking at them and our concept of vision. What the creation of digital photography now calls our attention to is not only the possibility of transforming but also fabricating a reality or what can be considered as real. This primary change obliges men to modify their capacity of articulation to adapt themselves to new and manufactured (and, therefore, optional) truths. Rodrigo Braga, in his work with photography in which, he creates images and therefore his own truths and presents them as if they had been torn out of some reality, is dealing, in fact, with information. His photos and, more generally, photos made by conceptual artists, provide information dissociated from tangible experience, which shows an invisible (or inexistent) reference. The value of this photography, thus, depends on its informational aspect, avoiding, among other things, the traditional fetishism of the art object, as the object of a photograph is a piece of paper covered with paint and its´ object, in many cases, does not exist. However, this main informational function of photography exists not only in art, but in all images produced by machines (as a consequence of a natural phenomenon, without the direct interference of men's hands during the mechanical process of capturing the image). When something is photographed, it becomes part of a system of information and adapts itself to classification and storage schemes. But what can we say about Rodrigo's photographs, once they have been captured without human interference, and, therefore, have no classification systems to get adapted to? Probably we will have to create classifications to organize this new information and, consequently, we will redefine and expand our previous notion of reality, and that exercise will happen every time it seems necessary. Hence, photography and especially digitally manipulated photography are conceptual modes of controlling reality, since they suggest the idea we have of it. Maybe information (as feelings, sensations, signs, etc.) is images that photography makes real and artists like Rodrigo Braga are conscious of it.