1) Your work is a clear recognition of photography as an artistic medium or a form of exploration of space as a conceptual laboratory. How did you get to photography, tell us about the obstacles and the visions that accompany you in the continuous testing of sight?
«It soon became clear that I would never become a photographer of advertising, or fashion, and I’d never in my life done reportage, while admiring and loving a lot of authors who have dedicated their lives to these areas. Photography has always been the means by which I tried to discover what is around me, is the tool that helped me, and helps me, to solve questions or change perspective on things. I’m always interested in people, or rather the observation of people, often from far away, almost hidden, and from there acting as scientists do with their microscopes. I like to focus my artistic research on characters met by chance on the street, and to invent stories about them, and to ask questions about their lives. Often I think my interpretation of reality will always be different from that of another, in this sense we are unique, as everyone looks at something in a subjective manner, and therefore different from someone else. This aspect of photography fascinates me more than anything; the fact that what is visible to us may be read, seen or written in a wide variety of ways. With a camera in hand I feel the need to define my vision, try to compare it with that of others, understand the differences of perception between what I see and what another person sees. Many of my works develop the theme of the “same time same place” seen from different perspectives and points. Reality can be read in many different ways by each other, and the environment changes through the perception of people. Photography so helped me to search this way, which keeps changing. That’s what fascinates me, inspires me and pushes me to continue to use the camera.»
2) You recently participated alongside artists from very different disciplines to the group exhibition Meli Melo: It’s a Mess! at Redchurch Street Gallery. Tell us how photography can live and evolve in a contemporary world that enhances contaminations and suggests rapid evolutions of thought?
«It was my first group exhibition in which different mediums – from painting to the installation – were involved together with photography. I don’t think that nowadays we can talk about photography, without seeing in it important contemporary influences. Photography, especially that called “artistic”, needs to consider outside influences intrinsic to the world we live in: advertising, press, fashion, design on one side and the classical arts, painting, sculpture and literature on the other side. I think the concept of photography has expanded, enlarged and moved away somewhat from the “Bressonian” assumption of formal perfection that existed at the beginning of the century. Looking at a picture, together with a painting or a sculpture, becomes extremely interesting. Our mind almost automatically recognizes the photograph as a child of all the other arts, and at the same time recognizes the great importance within the contemporary world that, in recent years, with the introduction of digital photography and its subsequent processing has generated invasions of field and exciting contamination.»
3) The series Untitled awakens attention to the fragility of the glance and the diversity of the moment, but also to photography as an endless possibility. The presences become extras before the lens that slowly tames them. The moment is a succession of fractions, bursts of light, situations in the making…
«When I first approached photography what struck me most was the fact that the camera, contrary to what one might think, always fires different images. One of the most important topics for “distorting” photography that places it outside the canonical definition of art is its reproducibility, the fact that an image can be copied and reproduced through the media forever. If we think more carefully about the photographic medium, however, we realize that equal images will never exist and that every time a camera snaps it impresses a single reproduction. Untitled is based in part on this. Thinking of the Heraclitean representation of time – that Man as subjected to the inexorable passage of time cannot have the same experience twice – photography is the appropriate way to lessen this idea. From this point of view a moving background, or a slightly different light, completely changes the meaning of the image. It is interesting the contrast that the environment generates in these images; it appears that the buildings, roads and buildings remain the same and seem immune to this logic. The opposite is presented as the characters become real actors who change, move, grow old and “perform” in a scene.»
4) 12 Years Old leads us to reflect upon our relations with the urban landscape, sometimes too idyllic even in its form of representation. A project that calls for a less binding dialogue with space. How did you develop this work?
«I wondered how someone else sees the same place that I see, what are the differences of vision of one man to the other of the same landscape, or the same stretch of the city. I toured the city with a little boy, gave him a camera and asked him to shoot whatever and whenever he wanted. I tried to set him free in his observations. I was interested in catching him when he was shooting. Thus was born a work that is based on multiple points of view of a single image. A major limitation of photography is that it can capture only a small part of reality and that alone, excluding in this way countless other shots. In this work the same moment splits into two images contemporaneous in time and space, succeeding in showing us two views of the same identical moment.»
5) Re-Tales again addresses the issue of the truth or illusion of reality often portrayed in an absolute way. Far from a serious documentary tradition this project also invites us to a confrontation with the world around us.
«Re-Tales somehow links up conceptually to what I later developed in 12 Years Old. It is central to my photographic research to find ways and techniques to scrub the physical limits of the camera. The fact that the photographer can choose only a tiny portion of reality in many cases has led me to find gimmicks to be able to insert the same image in different ways. Within Re-Tales the mirror becomes the means by which we can see something behind the photographer. The mirror can be thought of as a place of reflection and of doubling reality. Mirrors and photography are very similar in that both are limited areas of interaction of light and signs produced by it. As in a mirror, in a photograph we don’t see anything but an image, a reflection, and so an interpretation filtered by the photographer’s eye.»
6) Voyeur deals with the distance. The one that separates us from others, and that sometimes fails when respect is missing. When does voyeurism start?
«In Voyeur, the images are those of people being spied upon or watched without being aware. A contemporary voyeurism that becomes institutionalized in a society where behind the pretext of security any place can be photographed filmed and archived. In this way the distinction between public and private becomes increasingly blurred and everyone becomes the actor in a global big brother. The photos were taken in Vancouver. I felt like one of those reporters who lurk in the bush for hours, immovable, watching strange animals, and trying to capture the perfect moment. The apartments in my eyes became like so many theater stages in which different stories were held. I was collecting those plays as film stills and in doing so I was questioning that unknown life and time. Investigating somehow. I am extremely interested in the voyeuristic aspect of photography, the camera designed as an extension of the human eye and as a possibility to create stories. Spy stories.»
Text by Steve Bisson
© All copyright remains with photographer Alessandro Teoldi