Often the photographic capture differs from what I feel I have seen and does not reproduce what I want to remember. It will have happened to all those who do not use the camera professionally: that the photographic image does not look like what we thought we saw, and that the relationship between the feeling we had, the experience we had, and the result of the photographic capture - whether in black and white or colour - is disappointing. The fact is that human beings are not granted the ability to directly perceive objective reality - we see and understand everything through our own interpretation. Unknowingly we choose some aspects that selectively present to us a certain ‘meaning’, ignoring others that are nonetheless present in the frame; whereas the photographic lens captures everything, SEES, indiscriminately. We can direct the lens in many ways but the result is often ‘NOT YET’ there - a discrepancy which makes the image resemble something else, and does not reflect our experience of what we have seen. Suggesting something else. As I am not a photographer but trained as a painter, I thought I would transform this ‘distortion’ by superimposing it with veils of colour, thus bringing it closer to the general effect of my vision. In the 1980s, following the advice of Lila de Nobili, I got to know in Paris the technique used by Professor Wacker, who taught at the Beaux Arts - a method aimed at reproducing copies of antique paintings. With appropriate modifications it has proved compatible with this new use: the oil colouring of black and white prints made with cotton paper and ink jet techniques used exclusively by Acsaf-Firenze. |