The thing I most love about photography is its EMPIRICAL – INQUIRING – DOUBTING character. It is as though it were an extraordinary machine for imagining and glimpsing the complex and often fleeting face of reality.
There are no stories to be told but, perhaps, there are models to imagine and visions to recuperate.
Photography is the language most suited to listening to reality as a totality of what can be seen and what cannot be seen.
Photography does not come about by choosing fragments but, rather, by invoking the simultaneous participation of a myriad of details, impressions, accidents, facts, and bodies that are restructured like something new in a new picture whose dynamics and hierarchic logic or its hierarchical logic we cannot completely control.
It is like dealing with cinematographic, camera-edited “real time” in a single frame of work.
Photography has the property of associating together all times and all spaces.
The more the artist tries to impose the result, the more it becomes in some way overwritten by his preconceptions: the possible vision evaporates and shows us only ourselves. My approach is to try to share symbolically the prerequisites of forensic disciplines, to create and organize visual planes as though they were documents for reconstructing identities and events, the test of life that begins from a trauma and the loss of the body… and the atmospheric veil.
To photograph means understanding the dust that separates you from the thing you are looking at: it is nothing more than that: the colour of the dust in the air colours all the rest.
The most important thing for me is this mechanism, not a beautifying search for a single colour.
For my project about the Sacred Italian Renaissance I turned my eyes towards a point equidistant between sculpture, painting, and dust.
The amount of time needed for shooting is the same as the amount of time necessary for making changes on the scene. Even in apparent immobility, the changes in light add together.
I would more and more like to collect time within an image.
Vincenzo Castella