Ultimately, in all his work, Orrantia juxtaposes the experience of traveling to distant and exotic places with the familiar and local, through games of memory, scale and experience. He believes that to travel is to encounter the new, and that photography is the best way of recording it. Moreover, his photographs represent a journey to new ways of seeing. the eye of the beholder chooses what to see and that of the photographer what to show. This interest leads Orrantia to explore the technical and aesthetic possibilities of photography through the different technical processes it involves. In this respect, Orrantia is like the nineteenthcentury photographer who is discovering the possibilities and limitation of his own medium, or like the Romantic painter who began to understand the pictorial nature of his art. The last theme embodies the Romantic and Victorian imagery present in Orrantia’s work: the traveler or explorer and the longing for the exotic. The Romantic age was a period in which Europeans traveled more than ever to examine at first hand distant and exotic lands. Much of this tourism was fostered by European colonialism, which flourished during this period and was extensively developed during the Victorian age. With this, first the draftsmen and engravers, and later the photographers became travelers who were commissioned to record all what they saw on their journeys: landscape, architecture, people, animals and plants. Orrantia’s most recent work is a example of his interest in the image of the nineteenth-century traveler/photographer. “Taj Mahal” and “Amelia Earhart” allude precisely to the idea of traveling and recording the marvels of the journey. These works are proof of Orrantia’s constant interest in exploring, developing and expanding the photographic medium, in this case through the use of graphic reproduction and printmaking. Even though all these works allude to a distant past, they are contemporary and relevant to the Colombian context. “Taj Mahal” is based on a photograph of the
reconstruction of the Indian mausoleum in Bogotá’s Jaime Duque thematic park. With this, the artist creates his personal imaginary of a visit to the monument in times of the British colonization of India, playing with the idea of traveling both in time and space without moving from the present condition. In “Amelia Earhart” Orrantia suggests that the American traveler flew over Bogotá while hundreds of people saluted her from the main square, La Plaza de Bolívar. “Presence” brings the experience of 9/11 to a local context. In this work the photographer chose a well-known landmark in Bogotá, Las Torres de Fenicia, and “recreated” the moment when the first of the suicide airplane was mysteriously approaching the Twin Towers. Ultimately, in all these works Orrantia juxtaposes the experience of traveling to distant and exotic places with the familiar and local, through games of memory, scale and experience. Like Phileas Fogg, Orrantia attempts to travel around the world through his work. But in the end, he is also like Fogg’s faithful servant, Passepartout, who was the one truly seeing the new in the eighty-days journey. The French servant claimed, “I see it is by no means useless to travel, if a man wants to see something new.” Rodrigo Orrantia, like him, believes that to travel is to encounter the new, and that photography is the best way of recording it. Moreover, his photographs represent a journey to new ways of seeing.
Ana María Franco
Art History PHD Candidate University of New York March 2008