Every Sunday, I reach out to photographers previously featured on PHOTOSNACK and ask them to send me their spontaneous thoughts, observations, reflections, or advice.
Today, I am sharing with you the messages I got from Nicola Lorusso and Rob Amberg.
Nicola Lorusso
I think that of all the expressive disciplines; photography is the one that can bring poetry a little closer, probably without ever reaching it, as an activity that seeks in the word certain complicity or perhaps only a bit of illusion.
Well, reflecting on the general impoverishment we are witnessing nowadays - I am referring without rhetoric to the increasingly poor language we speak - I think that writing with light is a tool of resistance, and little do I care if new technologies constantly challenge everything.
I base myself on the concept of the optical register of the world, on the study of point of view, on the attraction that things and people exert on me, issues already much navigated by the masters of photography. My work, one might say, is a constant attempt to hand over to the viewer to create an interaction with them, a kind of dialogue more emotional than intellectual to communicate a transmission of meaning, if possible, or at any rate to activate memory, a reflection dormant in everyone's time.
I am a photographer of signs, and perhaps I became one by dint of getting lost in looking, trying to recognize the forms the pulsating world offers us. Photography, for me, is like a container of imaginary alphabets waiting to be deciphered. With my work, I only reveal a part, often even a small part, that can trigger a personal reading in the viewer. This means "feeling" because it is where the necessity of any language lies in its own time.
So, if my images occasionally escape the frenetic consumption that now conditions us on everything, if someone can linger for an extra moment looking at them, I think I have done something worthwhile.
I want to clarify one more thing: photographic discourse is always plural. Each photograph is the drop of a distillate, and its strength lies precisely in the contribution it makes to a larger project.
Nicola Lorusso was featured in PHOTOSNACK #195.
Rob Amberg
Gesture and Light.
Texture and Time.
Smell and Taste.
Eye and Hand.
How we interact with the world.
Where I stand.
Collective Memory and Internal Reality.
These are my concerns.
I make photographs for myself.
A search for Truth and some kind of Sense.
Common Ground and Trust.
Participant and Observer.
The shared experience of being Human.
Is there more?
Lately, I’ve thought, yes, there is more. I’ve begun to think of my images as fiction, historical short stories of a sort. It has to do with the viewers who bring their words of interpretation to any photograph.
Photographs need an external reality for their existence. What the photographer meant to say when making an image is often in stark contrast to what a viewer sees. It’s that inherent tension between two potentially opposing forces that take images into fictional territory and give them their life.
Rob Amberg was featured in PHOTOSNACK #215.
Sunday Editions connect you with photographers whose work you previously explored through PHOTOSNACK.
I want to reveal some authentic parts of the people behind the cameras.
I don’t ask them any specific questions. I ask them to share whatever comes to mind when they think about YOU, the readers of this newsletter.
It makes their responses genuine and personal.
I hope you enjoyed today's Sunday Edition.
Until next time,
Tomasz