Milano Porta Nuova / Garibaldi
I've taken these a few days before Christmas. No I have no exact prediction for the incoming year nor I have any expectations just looking for what will come downstream. My predictive abilities never have been so low. Anyway I can certainly predict that I will take a closer look to this area. By the way here is an interesting round table that may shed some light on the, felt, lessening of our predictive powers. See you the next year.
I'm entering my traditional hibernation and vacation time. I'll be back in ten days. ... Well maybe a bit more .... Best wishes.
This summer I've started to shift my perceptual attention in landscape photography from the objects to the relation among them and the way in which we and the objects themselves define the space we move in, perceive and interpret, this is something I've been thinking and reading about for long time but which I could not relate to an immediate perception. Each of us, human, probably have a different way to define a space based on our cultural backgrounds and personal experiences. In this study, concluded with this post, I've tried to act as a person walking along a couple of streets picturing, as a photo tourist, what caught my eye. Generally I make some studies before getting to a place. In this case the concept is the "unplanned walk" in an "unplanned place" for a fixed amount of time (2 hours circa). The idea is that a photographer is some kind of specialist when it comes to visual relation that define space, a specialist by experience. Visual experience is made "viewing" and not "reading" just to stay on a very obvious plane. Well this may be in some contrast with the canonical view that wants the photographer as a mere recorder of an already established landscape made by an Architect (or even the Creator).
Right after what Norberto Bobbio called the "society of traffic lights", in Italy, it seems, we are having the season of roundabouts. We are certainly late with respect to the other developed European Countries but, as usual, we are making our best in terms of Mediterranean obsession. I'm not sure of the subtle philosophical implications but certainly it requires a totally different approach in negotiations among drivers. In visual terms roundabouts reshape the visual landscape in very powerful ways redistributing space and view points and, ultimately, for the postmodern urban reader, the centre of the roundabout is certainly an exemplary "no where land".
Conjugating documentation and subjective view has always been considered a contradiction. Never the less this is what we daily experience in our approach to the world. Each time we take a picture we are documenting something, taking a fragment of time and fixating it. Even in the most abstract picture we make, we are documenting. Is it necessary to voluntarily document something to make an image more a "document" than an other ? I'm not sure. Marc Auge in its "Anthropology of the present", an effort in the foundation of an anthropological analysis of our own culture, distinguishes among "intended" historical artefacts and non intended ones, or those who's purpose is not to be used in some future as a document of a conventional present. At the end of every picture what it remains is the human, or the robot, taking it, its point of view (or the one of the programmer), his visual choices and the process till the finished image.
I've been a while without publishing urban landscapes taken inside Milan. In the next posts I'm going to showcase a small study on spaces and visual relationships I've made in one of the oldest industrial areas of Milan with, hopefully, some thoughts.
For those of you interested in readings in postmodern condition "narrative" an interesting list has been published a few days ago by aphotostudent blog. It contains references worth to be considered for an historical perspective on modernism and postmodernism. As clearly put in the paper from Habermas, in the list, the problem is that (post)modernism is a moving target, something that clearly depends on the point in time/space where the question about what is to be considered modern is raised. I have to confess that some recent developments in sustainable technologies are hard to not be considered modern, the word, however, became, so to say, unspeakable.
