'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be
neither will they become what they might appear to become.'
Posted by Martin CohenPhoto by Luca Bravo, via Unsplash
Luca Bravo, this month's photographer, is an Italian web developer whose portfolio of photographs is, he says, inspired by ‘silent hills, foggy mounts and cold lakes’. However, most of his photographs are of cityscapes because he is also interested in what he describes as ‘the complex simplicity of patterns and urban architecture’. Many of these images are of modern buildings, and many are striking – visually impressive. They use a limited palette of colours and feature geometrical extravagances created in steel and concrete.
But I liked this photograph best. It is of a rather modest building - only captured in a clever way. As our rubric for Picture Posts has it: here is something that isn't quite what it seems to be…
5 comments:
Luca Bravo is a gregarious person whose images seem to stand in stark contrast. They are so often depopulated, decolourised, decontextualised. The artist, like his images, 'isn't quite what he seems to be'.
The image is a downside, where everything is the same although the object has lost the materiality that it keeps up on the quay.
The reflected image is dreamlike, and reminds of quays where boats would unload their goods taken from far away countries. To me, the image seems to reflect the past, whatever one may image into that, and that at the end our homes are only temporarily shelters, theatres which will fade away.
This image, with its undulations, seems atypical from among Luca Bravo’s photographs: the sole example, which I could find anyway, of surrealism amidst an impressive expanse of realism. Actually, I was particularly drawn more to two of Bravo’s words cited here (as opposed to the image): ‘complex simplicity’. I would like to know what Bravo means, given such juxtaposition of paradoxically contradictory words. Though, to be sure, the complex can and should be expressed as simply as possible; and equally, embedded in illusive simplicity can be great complexity or profundity.
Thanks for the thoughts and comments, everyone! Yes, it is 'dreamlike' isn't it? I guess that's what appealed to me more than the crisp and precise geometrical shots of modern buildings. And yes, "complex simplicity" is an evocative phrase - oxymoron or not. I imagine it meaning that beneath the simplicity there is a complexity - which is not so illogical at all, is it?
Would Thomas like to share a bit more with us his enigmatic observation?
I do have a comment on the last comment. 'I guess that's what appealed to me more than the crisp and precise geometrical shots of modern buildings.' In this may lie the popularity of abstract art. It liberates us from 'the crisp and precise', which is not where we came from. Originally we had more of nature around us, which is both intricate and chaotic.
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