In The Adventure of a Photographer, a story by Italo Calvino, the protagonist, Antonino Paraggi, is a bachelor who initially scorns photography and to an extent, even relationships. Yet ultimately he becomes so consumed with capturing life through photographs that he rushes towards obsession if not virtual insanity.
Along the way he alienates Bice, a girl who apparently loves him, and proceeds to photograph her every waking and sleeping moment, often without her knowledge or consent. When she inevitably leaves him, Paraggi captures images of where she was or would be in the apartment they shared. He then decides to tear up the photos of the girl and photographs the fragments against a background of newspaper reportage images.
Finally “Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course he had left, or rather, the true course he had obscurely sought all this time”.
Artist and photographer Cindy Sherman in an interview in 1982, strengthens this concept by telling us that a photograph should transcend itself, go beyond the image or its medium, in order to have its own presence. A photograph is its own truth… no more and no less.
In an age where the traditional photographic camera has given way to other portable devices as the main recorders of love and memory and where photography has increasingly become an overtly ephemeral activity based on the sharing of images that could be deleted without conscience, it is reassuring to see artists who show enthusiasm and serious commitment towards the art form, and who acknowledge this phenomenon and cut across it with works that communicate in a contemporary language and a present-day sensibility.
It is therefore fascinating for me to view the works of these 10 photographers/artists/thinkers exhibiting in the Valletta Photography Festival – from the personal truths they present us with – truths as individual as their own personality – truths that continually cross the border between seeing and knowing, sight and consciousness, eyes and mind.
A quick look at some common concerns in this exhibition will reveal an interest in micro communities within our society, such as the case with Chris Sant Fournier’s vernacular architecture series, which plays on a classless architecture driven by desiderata, creating an aesthetic of necessity. The images compress reality to angles of pristine green in two dimensions which inevitably lead the eye to the desired respite of shore and sea.
Marie Micallef’s images are ones of joyous celebration, where the island’s sense of revelry extends well away from its shores. The camera becomes an active participant in the festa, both as a marching band member as well as a celebrator of the beloved patron saint.
On the other end of character portrayal, Joe Smith’s portraits arrest the moment – they narrate human dramas through silence and introspection, slicing through time details of the personal.
The concern with photographic time also dominates the works of Darrin Zammit Lupi, whose images cut across the boundaries between the still and the moving – ghosts of memories that live between photography and film.
The photographs of Gilbert Calleja live within the realms of anticipation that precedes an important event. He portrays heroes before the act, men who know that they have to go it alone and stairwells that may equally lead to triumph or defeat. Ken Scicluna also portrays heroes – they are the protagonists of today’s media, victims through being the men, women or children of the hour, they face the lens with equal doses of courage and apprehension.
Stephen Vella’s forms also deal with the human. Although their concern is with the outer, they speak of the soul, an interiority that exposes itself through the spatter of granular texture, caught before vanishing into thin air.
Elisa von Brockdorff plays with scale and vulnerability, her colourful doll houses are perilously placed in the wilderness, they are left unsheltered and, like a lonely child in a grown-up world await in innocent fear the prospect of the fatal happening.
Denise Scicluna makes comparisons and reconciliations, her images place on equal ground seemingly unrelated objects and words to create new hybrids – contrasting couples that unite to create new meanings.
Lastly, Nigel Baldacchino’s work borders between performance and document, whose images act as introspective mirrors that reflect extracts from an active interior monologue.
The Valletta Photography Festival has been extended till this Sunday. For more info. on the venues and artists please visit: http://www.vallettaphotofest.com/