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Urbanities – on floating streets
On floating reality & Street Photography is an academic essay, an arm of current studies at LaborAt - Laboratory of Languages and Hypertextual Learning Environments, whose objective was to explore the representation of reality, through a transfigured sight, producing new meanings by the angulation and camera lens. Photography assuming the poetic character of such a singular expression of space, from a displacement of the sensitive gaze; a unique experience inherent to the act of photography, in which the apparent and the hidden, the real and the surreal, the photographer and the photographed become melted, in a merge, without, however, becoming invisible in the image produced. The poetics of poetry, one would say. But no, it is, in fact, the poetics of photography, ironically derived from what Roland Barthes most criticized it for: its exclusive potential – today alchemical, in digital ways – of placing, side by side, the photographed and the photographer. There is a lot to explore in the potential of photographic poetics for researches on human representations, but let us first explore the pleasure of reading photography in its captivating and inspiring beauty..
The work took place in the winter of 2024, in New York, using only a Canon R6-II camera, a versatile 35mm f. 1.8, used indoors, and a wide-angle EF 17-40mm, for street photography. The indoor photos were taken in two iconic museums of NY – the Museum of the City of New York and the branch of the Fotografiska Museum in lower Manhattan – chosen for their vocation in organizing exhibitions open to the form of installations, which provided us with a great field of spaces and images for the essay. At Fotografiska, I must register, there were running two exhibitions of photographs, from which I occasionally made up “paraphrases”; some of them from the exhibition “Pets in contemporary photography”, were produced by Sophie Gamand, Gerrad Gethings, Robert Bahon and Elliott Erwitt; others, especially with installation effects, were from the exhibition “Introspection” by Frank Ockenfels. After selections and editions, the essay resulted in 64 photographs, representing distinct single subjects and technics of representation – a small number... but academically relevant.
Here for the gallery, I selected 24 of them, allocated into 3 sets: 1. Urbanities – on floating streets; 2. On floating realities – The Museum of the City of New York. 3. On floating poetries – The Fotografiska New York. This is set #1.
