Photography is much more than the instant moment visual document…
Historically conceptual, experimental, documentary or staged artistic intellectual inputs made photography a tool for creative expression – visual art. But also within that use of the medium of photography the picture itself mostly was (and still is) perceived as fragment of time and light – the true and trusty reproduction of an instant moment of reality…
The digital photographic age as well as tricking in the dark room in former days (or any other photographical technical “trick”) conceals the true and trusty reproduction of reality and might bring back some “imperfections” of reality which might help the eyes of the spectator to discover things in a different way … such as the medium of painting always did and was used, for good and for bad…
My personal experiences of real photography large scale staging, registered on a film of an analogue 360 degree panoramic camera, helped to questioning the instant moments with much larger timeframes in surround picture angles – but still obtaining a kind of “classical instant photographical expression”. Technically picture angle and “recording time” already were a clear statement to the “imperfection” of reality… and furthermore – not too much surprising – the archetypes of those analogue complex photographs were historic paintings…
While this experience was one way to push photographic limits to create real “imperfection” of reality without any digital manipulation the next step was to use photographical, digital and postproductional possibilities of our days in a complex technical combination to register the creations of real staged living paintings:
Again the perfection of the “imperfection” of reality is to be found in real paintings of old masters – which often deliver inspiration and example to the projects. It is about obtaining a photographical result with raising a claim to this perfection of the “imperfection” of reality in paintings…
To be able to realize projects like this and to leave a lasting legacy there are important and mostly creative and educational 3 to 4 weeks preparatory cooperation with all participants who will act out of those workshops as figurants and “actors” within the projects final phase.
The preparations for the scenery itself are more likely cinematic – just it is all about one frame, one very complex single frame: full of impacts, messages, details and all different occurrences build and performed into a real landscape and composed like an orchestration of a historic painting.
Neither the expected image resolution nor the controlling of the entire setup is possible with one simple “click” of course: it is lots, hundreds, of those “true and trusty reproduction of an instant moment of reality” each of them separately set into its composed position within the entire staging. The timeframe for doing all this after some rehearsals are some hours only, depending on light and shadow changings as the concentration of all participants.
Once each single on-going of the composition and the empty scenery in detailed single shots were registered now all this puzzle-pieces are assembled again to one “classical instant photographical expression” – technically called a “Gigapixel” photography and most probably an impressive example of “the imperfection of reality”, a photographical real-live painting maybe?…
