Tag: rodolfo asin

Rodolfo Asin – Noelia (2013)

A black and white photograph (and I say photograph specifically because no matter what your opinion on digital, there is no damn reason anyone should be working in B&W in digital–it’s just poor form) can convey a lot of things. It can be sinister, moody, clinical, severe, etc., etc.

In other words, a B&W photograph no matter the concept or execution carries a sense of shining a light onto a scene in a such a way that allows the viewer to discover the foreign in the familiar.

Color just doesn’t work like that. A photo or image can be in color and be good and important and sumptuous without really even being about the color.

So every B&W image is at a certain level monochromatic in the same way and every color photo or image appears in color in a different way.

Loosely speaking, when we are interrogating color images there are two sorts of photos/images: those in color and those about color.

To my mind, William Eggleston is really the only photographer who ever managed to cobble together a body of work managed–largely–to accomplish both.

Eggleston established a beach head that allowed other photographers–like Stephen Shore, Jeff Wall and Joel Sternfeld to emerge. These photographers were interested in trying to bridge the gap between color as facet of the image and color as intrinsic to the images manifold meaning.

Yet, most work post-Eggleston color work seems less interested in solving a problem like color than dealing with issues of color fidelity, depicting mundane normalcy (for some reason B&W always seems more immediate and authentic, even though it’s not how we naturally perceive the world) and the employment of color as a means of orchestrating emotional response.

Whereas, folks like Harry Gruyaert, focused on color itself.

Now what I find interesting is that to a certain degree Shore, Sternfeld and Gruyaert and desaturate their photos, the images lose some of their punch but they still work. (With Gruyaert, you have to bear in mind that he titled his images. Also, I’ll concede that this might be splitting hairs since both Shore and Wall both work in both color and B&W.)

Eggleston desaturated is just fucking pointless–the color is effectively the glue holding everything together.

These days–sadly–most of the raft of internet famous photographers & image makers produce images in color or B&W and more likely a combination of the two. But I’m hard pressed to name anyone who like Eggleston is making work that only works in color. @pru-e is the first person who comes to mind. (But that’s also not entirely fair since she’s arguably one of the best up and coming image makers in the world.)

Asin, like Shore, Wall and Sternfeld, loses a good bit of his punch in a desaturated reimagining of his work. But he is doing some extremely exciting things with color. The work absolutely loses some of its punch in B&W but it also loses a vitality that the color contributes to the scenes.

I’ve featured another of his images several years back and I was just as taken with his use of color then as I am now.

Rodolfo Asin – Victoria Bernabei (201X)

There’s probably in excess of a seven (7) stop dynamic range between absence of shadow detail and loss of highlight detail.

In order to accomplish that you really have to know the latitude of your emulsion/sensor and make sure your exposure is dead fucking on.

But what impresses me about this is the fact that you have both a strong blue (the water in the pool), a saturated green (the grass, palm fronds and plants above Bernabei’s head) and a distinct red (the lower panel on the door).

It requires a masterful effort to balance those elements in any image but all that is merely an overture meant to frame both the exquisitely rendered skin tone and morning/evening sun on the palm tree.

All that on top of a thoughtful, balanced composition.

It’s rare for me to encounter work that causes me to pause and independently consider color as anything more than a part contributing to the total sum of the image. Generally, when I think of what I would label masterful use of color it’s work from Eggleston or The Double Life of Veronique–arguably the best example of color cinematography in the western film historical canon. And not to diminish the brilliance of both, what I like about them is they make me think about the role color plays in the reading of an image. Yet, what the demonstrate isn’t easily applicable to my own photographic voice.

I can’t really process it all at the moment, but I feel the stunning color separation in this and the way it is employed in a layered fashion to re-frame the scene from a fine art meditation on the quietness of a moment to a sort of implication of the erotic potential in the physicality of the inter-relationship between being in a body, being caressed by light and therefore seen.

There’s definitely some problems with Asin’s larger body of work and objectification of women’s bodies but the skill of the photographer does manage to sublimate the objectification from time to time–to fucking spectacular effect.