Introduction
The street conducts the flaneur into a vanished time
Walter Benjamin
On one side the city – urban fabric of moving beings. On the other, the double look – the human eye and the mirror game of a photographic camera: frames and cuts. But in the case of Marcus Freitas, there is yet another instance or, one could argue, another mediation in addition to that of optical device(s). The approach on the streets is made in his case by way of deformations, never head-on. From the resulting reflection onto the smooth surface of vehicles (carcass and windows) to the distorted sights screened by rain-washed windshields (on a bus), what you get is hardly what you seem to see.
Marcus repeats, in an extreme way, the principle of Baudelaire’s flâneur. But his flanerie is that revisited by Walter Benjamin, in his early 20th century approach of that distinguished poetry character. A passer-by roaming at random, taking possession of the city in a wavering fashion, having in his hands a camera to operate what Benjamin once labeled the “optical unconscious” . Shooting his double looks he captures, way beyond intention, that which is pure surprise (for the reader which he also is).
The unveiled images/landscapes are those typically normalized by the brain’s automatic distortion-correction feature. We know the tilted buildings recorded by our eyes are made of straight, orthogonal lines, and that their curvaceous look is but circumstantial. In like manner, what the rainy veil conceals is supplemented in one’s imagination by that which we already know about the landscape across. But as photographic documents they perpetuate another form, the unusual one introduced by the reflective processes involved. Now they can no longer be “corrected”, for they are now indices of a “truth” captured by the machine. Such is the great trick by the artist. A trick that opens up the possibility of another, made possible by the digital era: post-shooting distortion of the photographed image, by way of image editing software. This intervention must however be seen in its relation to the original deformation. It is but an addition to the on-site distortions, the result of random shooting. Nothing more than the diffuse perception of a flaneur.
A subversion of form that dates back to the portraits of grand master André Kertèsz, on his surreal spree, all of which named Distortion, 10, 102, 53... And what does that suggest? A denaturalization of the records, no doubt (since it implies some human intervention, some type of choice). But here too there is a dialog with painting, bringing afloat other possible associations, the first of such being the relocation of photography into the realm of arts (as support and as language). A second one could be its resemblance to the act of painting as an attempt to depict (which, after the initial crisis of its birth, liberated the presentation character of painting, as opposed to its previous statute of conventional representation). A third association would be linked to the acknowledgment that the photograph carries a potential for imaginative intervention, one not committed, that is, to the strict reproduction of what is seen. The photographic image broadens its horizons by incorporating all possible distortions. And in so doing comes unequivocally close to painting.
The series presented by the artist appears to follow this logic: a photograph containing pictorial characteristics. Here he dialogs with some experiences by another great photographer – a contemporary colleague in this case – Mexico’s Pedro Meyer, who develops his research in what he calls “the camera’s brush”, which he understands as the most radical possibility of writing with light , where the impression created by the captured image is no different that the digital intervention. The pictorial character in Marcus’ works seem to have found their locus here: between the fortuitous, the random image, and the record shared with the “stylus pen”. A granulation that seems to undo the horizon… a texture resembling the strokes of an expressionist painter –¬ both stemming from the mediation of reflections. But on the other hand, a change in colors suggested as a new way to look at everyday life, where everything is given but not necessarily recognized. It is another landscape, transposed from the large city’s routine to the universe (re)built by the author’s fantasy ... Very familiar… And yet very distant.
The street seen through the windows of a bus, or the window of a camera, or the window on one’s monitor: such are the inputs in this case... urban landscapes reflected... also in our eyes.
Marília Panitz
November of 2006.
------------------
1 - BENJAMIN, Walter “ The flaneur”, In, Obras Escolhidas III: Charles Baudelaire, um lírico no auge do capitalismo, São Paulo, Brasiliense , 3ª edição/2ªreimpressão, 1997, p. 185
2 - “It is another nature that speaks to the camera rather than the eye; other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious (...) It is through photography that we discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the psychic unconscious through psychoanalysis”, BENJAMIN, Walter, “The Small History of Photography”, In, Sobre arte, técnica, linguagem e política, Lisboa: Relógio D’Agua, 1992, p.119.
3 - “The word photography, as we all know, means “writing with light”. Well, never in my life time, have I ever had a more direct experience of actually writing with light, as I have in recent years, when taking a stylus pen, and actually being in a position to move around, at my will, all those pixels that were captured through my digital camera...” Pedro Meyer, “A photograph is a photograph is a photograph”. ZoneZero, 2004 – http://www.zonezero.com
