Carlo Cremonini’s Artist Statement
The camera inherently leaves a mark on everything it captures. Therefore, the extent to which an artist can leave their mark is limited. In short, the tool takes up interpretive space.
The world has never been black and white, pixelated or between dark bars, but our visual technology has been all of those things. Advancements in video and photography processes have left us with media that manipulate their proximity to us. Without context, clues from style, or setting, we can intuitively recognize a camera phone image as the present or near present. Conversely, we feel black and white images put subjects in the past, independent of clues that say otherwise.
The work I have done with pinhole photography allows me to capture a subject that is recognizable with a presentation that may not be. As the viewer uses their smartphone to uncover the images, they will be comparing two viewing tools, eyes and screen. They will be comparing two photographs, positive and negative.
When conservators colorize old film, we feel our proximity to those people and places increase. In part, my work is about doing just the opposite. My subjects are contemporary but the medium we meet them in is not. The distance between the viewer and subject is emphasized. The perceived or actual veneers of time that accumulate on these visual technologies are important to recognize, but they steer us away from the realization that fundamentally they are not as significant as we perceive them to be. This realization allows us to engage with rather than being distracted by our distance to them.
Asking the viewer to look deeper than the visual technology does not mean that they should ignore it. In fact, by asking them to uncover the image themselves I have asked them to engage with it far more. This work asks the viewer to meet the subject and medium with minimal preconceptions, to share in the magic that is created when light meets silver, when paper meets chemistry, and to remember that photography is not reliant on complex technologies.
The rest is up to you.