Artist statement
"Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried."
Bill Brandt
The things which we can not grasp and hold in today’s city, the things that are ever-changing, that transform and reshape throughout the minutes of the day are what fascinate me the most about today’s modern city. Visual abstraction of the city is the only true way of becoming intimate with it, of discarding the everyday and discovering the poetic. In a place such as London, the dense confluence of the intangible greatly affects our perception of the city and creates intense and multifarious readings of the urban experience. As a photographer and someone who is very aware of my visual environment, I encounter everyday moments which for me are captivating, moments which elude being captured: reflections in glass facades, the movement of silhouettes in the evening against the glowing lanterns of shopfronts, the washes of colour on the pavements at night, the dance of shadows and light, the flow and counterflow of crowds in the streets.
These moments are all made more intense to me when I experience them while moving, circulating, speeding through the city; because they appear in rapid succession, their significance is amplified. In my photography, I borrow these moments, fragments and glimpses as elements for my compositions; with them I strive to develop a language that reflects and evokes the city. I further transform these elements by using mechanical devices such as movement, long exposures and underexposure to create images that subvert the traditional distinctions between painting and photography, images that are not readable as absolute, images that do not portray a definite world but rather a world to which each viewer can bring his or her own vision and memory of the city.
Bill Brandt
The things which we can not grasp and hold in today’s city, the things that are ever-changing, that transform and reshape throughout the minutes of the day are what fascinate me the most about today’s modern city. Visual abstraction of the city is the only true way of becoming intimate with it, of discarding the everyday and discovering the poetic. In a place such as London, the dense confluence of the intangible greatly affects our perception of the city and creates intense and multifarious readings of the urban experience. As a photographer and someone who is very aware of my visual environment, I encounter everyday moments which for me are captivating, moments which elude being captured: reflections in glass facades, the movement of silhouettes in the evening against the glowing lanterns of shopfronts, the washes of colour on the pavements at night, the dance of shadows and light, the flow and counterflow of crowds in the streets.
These moments are all made more intense to me when I experience them while moving, circulating, speeding through the city; because they appear in rapid succession, their significance is amplified. In my photography, I borrow these moments, fragments and glimpses as elements for my compositions; with them I strive to develop a language that reflects and evokes the city. I further transform these elements by using mechanical devices such as movement, long exposures and underexposure to create images that subvert the traditional distinctions between painting and photography, images that are not readable as absolute, images that do not portray a definite world but rather a world to which each viewer can bring his or her own vision and memory of the city.
Dark 02
2003, Digital C-type print, 40.6 x 30.5cm
