SILVER TIME

SILVER TIME

THE MEASURING OF TIME TIME WITHOUT MEASURE The swarm of digital images invading our lives has transformed the way we look at things. The increase in quantity has proportionately reduced looking time at individual items. The speed with which images can be captured with the help of amazing digital technology has completely changed the very act of photographing as an interaction with the subject in front of us – that event has become a cold harvesting of information which piles up any-old-how in digital memories, without involving any real experience, any particular awareness or attention.

Everything spins with an obsessive acceleration towards an atomised, formless time, that gets away from us, no longer a linear time but one that seems always to be speeding up. Times and spaces become measureless, communicate no experience, cease to speak to us, lack consistency in this photographic rendering achieved without effort, weightlessly. By employing a big, heavy camera, on a heavy tripod, and using big photographic plates, I have done my best to eliminate that levity from the act of photographing, expanding time so that it occupies a more intimate. a more effortful scale, requiring considered choices.

This unprettified dimension is not like a bright, full-colour screen, but clean and minimal: a subtle black and white – leaving you to imagine the colours – that speaks to us in a mysterious fashion, not least through its shadowing.

The optimisation provided by technology, offering a guaranteed painless and polished result, encourages us to be compulsive tourists, pointing our smartphones instead of looking: photography no longer demands technical know-how arduously earned – today’s machines have an extraordinary degree of automation that removes every obstacle or negotiation. There is no journey, only arrival. And the accumulation of easy arrivals diminishes their weight and significance; but it’s way-stations that construct our experience, thresholds that eroticise our approach to the result.

The ease with which we can now acquire information is no substitute for experience; a bulimia of notions destabilises and accelerates time.

This is what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has to say about the phenomenon of accelerating time and the anxieties that derive from it: The tourist is not journeying in any real sense… as far as he is concerned, journeys are reduced to empty displacements between things ‘worth visiting’… everything revolves around destinations; the spatial interval separating him from his point of arrival is just an impediment to be overcome as quickly as possible. Utter orientation around the goal robs the intermediate space of all importance, reduces it to a corridor without any value of its own. Acceleration is an attempt to make the in-between time needed for traversing the intermediate space disappear entirely. And thus the richness of the sense of travelling is also lost. Acceleration therefore leads to a semantic impoverishment of the world. Space and time no longer mean anything. If the spatial/temporal interval is seen only negatively in terms of loss and lateness, efforts will be concentrated on making it vanish altogether.

In the extended technical process of large-format analogue photography, time re-acquires its flavour; in the slow journey towards the final print, the journey itself becomes part of the experience, the human gaze returns to dwelling in the dialogue between the subject and the material, an exchange that is crystallised in the phrasing of blacks and whites that dance entwined.

“it’s an analogue technique and difficult to control, but through that control the formal outcome becomes an aesthetic one” Alessandro Moggi

THE PROJECT These surviving traces of Etruscan culture provide an occasion for reflection on time, on history – our history – and on the act of photographing. The ability to dwell on things, eluding the logic of our accelerated world, is what we find in the images created by Alessandro Moggi with Eugenia Maffei, where every shot is meticulously measured. It’s an approach that invites the gaze to linger on the image: here are signs and lines that become elements of the design, light and shade that confer a third dimension on figures, the veining of leaves and fractures in rocks that underline the reality of these landscapes.

Sovana, Sorano, Pitigliano, Chiusi, Cortona, Volterra, Baratti, Florence… and then archaeological sites, tombs, museums, collections seen often enough before but here made to seem brand new, and crisply sharp in these super-detailed large-format images. The extended creative process makes it possible to establish a deep personal relationship with the object portrayed that engages the viewer: our encounter with the past takes on contemporary attributes in an imagery where place and time are empowered to speak.

LA THE TECHNIQUE

A rigorously analogue technique, with a 8X10 inch photographic negative and a large-format view camera.

A process that becomes something of a rite, with its particular moments and phases: the scouting for the best viewpoint, the 90lbs of equipment to shoulder; the infinitely drawn-out time it takes to get the eye aligned with so complex a technique: never more than five shots a day. The economy of means increases the density and heightens awareness of what is in front of one: the choices must be exact – there are not the infinite possibilities of digital. During the period when you are positioning the camera, the subject continues to speak to you, to interact with you, suggesting options and changes of angle.

From such encounters, images emerge that communicate the act of lingering, of looking deeply, balancing spaces and objects, the proportions of the photograph.

PRINTING Â The photographic plates obtained from the shoot are then developed by hand so as to accurately monitor tonal fidelity.

The long procedure continues with printing with silver salts on baryta paper: a technique that has remained unchanged since1890, carried out in a darkroom, producing results that cannot be matched by modern digital techniques. This kind of printing imbues the image with the lustre of silver, the same silver that the image is actually made from. It is the precious metal that renders the tones so rich, while the photographic surface is enlivened by the wonderful juxtaposition of greys that delicately modulate the volumes.

THE EXHIBITION 23 images, printed at 20x24 inch, of Etruscan landscapes and details, together composing a story outline and light-and-shade prompt evocations of the past and the present, but above all they speak of an ancient and traditionally skilled modus operandi, producing contemporary results where formal qualities are once again uncompromisingly brought to the fore.

info@alessandromoggi.com +39 335 658 66 28