Technique
B&W film photography. Direct capture.
Presentation
“In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke”
“The Circular Ruins” by J.L. Borges
The wizard in “The Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges wanted to dream a man, and he “wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality”. After some unsuccessful attempts, he understood that “modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order.”
What is this vertiginous and incoherent substance that dreams are made of? Isn’t it the indefinite bottom of human condition? Isn’t it a finite web of images, words and thoughts? Isn’t artistic creation the fantasy of holding and, at the same time, transcending one’s own finitness, and glimpsing God on it?
The tough purpose of dreaming, of reaching the indefinite with the images of dreams, making with these images a synthesis where the opacity of the undetermined, reality and simulation blend .This is maybe the mechanism given to us in artistic creation as a strange but fair redemption. Perhaps it is our greatest dignity…because if we cease to dream, we risk losing ourselves in the circularity of having ourselves dreamt, and thus we would return to the light , cold , soluble substance of someone else’s dream.
In this sense, photography- which catches only what light reveals- takes us to the real, recalling and transforming it into a metaphor which allows us to delve deep into a world of dreams, a world of imagination, a world of “traces of unreality” . In Jean-Claude Lemagny‘s beautiful words: “in photography’s heart it is the poetry of traces, something was there, and left a trace, imagine…”
The photo portfolio “The Circular Ruins” tries to look into this fantastic and tortuous world of dreams and the imaginary in which the individual enlightens and questions his own existence.
