BEHIND THE ARTIST LENS - week 1

"seescapes" - Hiroshi Sugimoto

Welcome to my account, the Luna Gallery account, my online gallery where I want to present some of my artistic projects. In this section we'll explore education in reading photographs, both works by great masters and my own productions, a reading from both an aesthetic point of view—compositional, style or chromatic choice, black and white, color—and the message the photographer wanted to convey through their work.

So an aesthetic and contemplative analysis.

I'll start with two photographers who inspire me greatly in the realization and creation of my own photographic works—two landscape photographers who used predominantly black and white and predominantly analog medium, large format film.

I, on the other hand, use a mixed digital and analog medium with small, medium and large format for my works because I started with large format more than 25 years ago! I also use mixed techniques of photography and painting for some images—that is, I first print the photo then intervene pictorially on the canvas directly or on paper. I'm starting with these two great masters because I draw great inspiration from them and the first image I presented this week of The Shamanic Journey project is precisely an image inspired somewhat by both authors: Ansel Adams and Hiroshi Sugimoto, who used the long exposure technique extensively to render water very fluid.

In particular, I really love Hiroshi Sugimoto for his multidisciplinary approach—he draws inspiration from architecture, painting, sculpture, philosophy because he feels he belongs to all these categories—and I really like him for his use of the conceptual idea of photography using natural landscape elements, not creating something for example in a studio like in still life, and for the use of these very long exposures that make images of sky, clouds and especially water very fluid, dreamlike.

Ansel Adams

As for Ansel Adams, I really love the epic vision of some landscapes that make them eternal, famous are those of Yosemite National Park in the United States.

Here we see some examples both of Hiroshi Sugimoto, this beautiful image from the Seascapes series, and one of the most famous images by Ansel Adams, sunrise on El Capitan. Sugimoto revealed for this series of photographs how he had a vision of this image of sky and sea, the horizon without any kind of life shown in the photograph—an animal, a bird or a boat—a vision probably a memory linked to youth.

Yosemite National Park - Ansel Adams

Instead my approach is often different, the opposite—I have a concept I want to express through a style and then I choose perhaps the perspective, framing, composition, the best subject to be able to render this concept. In my Shamanic Journeys series with this waterfall photo, what I wanted to convey is how nature teaches us, nature is teacher and above all nature speaks to us as in ancient and native cultures where life is marked by beliefs in nature spirits that show the way.

The choice of black and white is often linked to the need to eliminate any distraction and make the image more essential. Color is often an element of distraction—our attention is concentrated on color because people immediately begin to recognize and associate the subject, they begin to create recognizable categories in their mind associated with a clear memory, so they only see a postcard.

Whereas I wanted to show something more than a postcard, so black and white helps to extrapolate the subject which remains recognizable but becomes closer to a poem, a philosophical message rather than a postcard or photographic documentation, and here the rocks transform more than anything into shadows, the water into this continuous very soft romantic flow, and so we have more contrast between black and white which also picks up the Taoist concept of opposites and one can say surrender more to this type of contemplation. So water is a very important element of nature and this space, this small lake, is precisely like a perfect place for a gathering, for a moment of meditation where only the sounds of nature—the flow of water, wind, birds—provide background and it's almost like a mantra in one's head, perfect for meditation.

The same with Hiroshi's images, especially this one from the Seascape series—as the photographer himself admitted, they are philosophical images, so a contribution of philosophy and poetry was very important in creating his images because he wants to convey the immutability of certain things. The marine horizon will not change even with the passing of millennia. From a graphic point of view, the weights are perfectly balanced between sky and sea because the horizon divides the frame perfectly in half.

Now instead I'll reveal the visual reading analysis of my photograph. The balance of masses. There's a diagonal element that guides the eyes from left to right, the rule

of thirds perfectly applied and the point of visual interest.