Project Description
WATERFALLS (2016 – 2020)
In this project, low resolution animated gifs of flowing waterfalls collected from the internet are projected onto 4×5″ B&W plate negatives.
Their exposure, development, and printing follow the processes described by Ansel Adams in his trilogy of manuals.*
The resulting images are defined by the artifacts resulting from their multiple mediatic and material transformations.
Process
Process: Optical Exposure from Projector to Film / Diagrams
Process: Demonstration (stills)
Process: Compression and Expansion / Diagrams
References
References: JPEG / GIF
References: Still Image to Animated Image
Source: https://youtu.be/1_RbWWx_8FI
References: GIF Sources
Project Description
WATERFALLS (2016 – 2020)
Waterfalls contrasts the materiality and the techniques of traditional analog processes, historically related to the landscape photographic genre –mainly those related to the group f64: an amplified tonal range, hyperfocality and sharpness– to the logics of vernacular digital contemporary photography: the free, immaterial, lo-res, and omnipresent flow of compressed images defined by “Poor Images”*.
If Landscape is all that is “around and outside”, then approaching the mobile digital image -information that surrounds us- under the technical and formal strategies of what has historically been related to the genre, is a logical sidestep into the hybrid field, between the URL and the IRL, in which we live. Low resolution animated gifs of waterfalls -mainly used as “dumb” cell phone wallpapers, resucitated recently as flowing images on messaging apps- are projected onto 4×5 plate negatives and worked on their exposure, development, and printing following the processes described by Ansel Adams in his trilogy of manuals.
The resulting images are defined by the artifacts resulting from their multiple material transformations. Diffuse-edged arrangements replace the pixel, countless shades of gray supplant 128 shades of gray, a low resolution gives way to another logic of sharpness and scale defined by the grain of the film and the texture of the photographic paper from which they emerge, in a project that seeks to make evident some traditionally hidden processes in which that diffuse concept that is the photographic are sustained.