V. HYPERREALITY
“It is not about the image anymore” has been a recurring topic of discourse among contemporary photographers since the popularisation of Instagram in 2010.
We live in the challenging time, because of the constant exposure to visualstimuli. However, I think that visual overload makes the new wave of photographers to develop a critical awareness of the medium's limitations. And then when you think about the medium, everyone is a photographer nowadays. The question is: how many of those images will I remember? Are any of the images I produce will be remembered for decades?
Conscious of the triteness of travel photography, I re-examine my intentions in taking these photographs. People have always needed to represent and interpret their world. From the cave-drawings to the digital image technology. We do it for avariety of reasons, but it has always been a fundamental practice for humanity. For example cartography. From navigating an unknown ocean to having a piece of land on a piece of paper, of course, the map is not the territory, but there is always a desire and need of possessing it in some way. Think of the “On exactitude in science” by Jorge Luis Borges, if we don't make the drawing of a little piece of land somewhere in the ocean, that piece of land doesn't exist. We need representation to make sense of things, a favorite photographic topic.
Contemporary society multiplied the levels of abstractions, by making representations of representations, photographs of photographs. Some years ago the philosopher Jean Baudrillard theorized the Hyperreality, the fact that we live in a world made of images, where the photos are our experience, where all is composed of references with no referents. Our life immersed in this meta-loop and only significant amount of time will reveal it's meaning.
This study has been influenced by the 20th century Kodak Photo Spots. Being one of the thousands of the images tagged with the same hashtag, this photographic study invests to the Internetvisual heritage. These photographs represent my attempt to separate my artistic voice from the chorus of triviality.