“…Like dragging your body randomly soaked in light paint, over a canvas of darkness…”
Ean Kotard
While exploring the known techniques of intentional camera movement and long exposure, it was inevitable to start playing with the programmed or intentional object movement. By getting impatient while waiting for people to pass by and shape the needed ghostly effect with their feet, or getting bored by the predictable light painting made by cars while running their highway trajectory, I found an opportunity. Long exposure, light painting along with a well choreographed position-changing object, or as I call it, “intentional object movement”.
“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Not arguing with Cartier-Brensson, I find that with “intentional object movement”, the achieved results are sharper than “intentional camera movement”, while preserving the artistic nuances of movement and ability to intentionally explore chaos, with humbleness.
I explore this in my “Study on Bacon’s -Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X-. Variant 1”, where
https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/study-after-velazquezs-portrait-pope-innocent-x
I’m approaching the subject with a still camera, focused on the area of interest, choreographed light painting, and a very visceral but intentional head movement from the model, within a twenty-second exposure. The take encapsules the object within the ghostly record of the transition between all its positions, embellished by strokes of light paint. It’s the registry of a scream, in action, humbly chaotic.
Similarly, in “Don’t, breathe, son.”, the face goes through a transmutation from stillness to a scream, describing a moment of William Tell’s story, when the son had to stay still for his father to shoot an apple off his head. This take shows the red apple incrusted in the son’s forehead, as part of his head, and the scream is accompanied by blurry eyes right before they are shut in fear.
In the next example (“Head study 0325 “), a vertical composition, the transmutation from sobriety to skepticism is more pronounced, where the two stages are clearly separated but fused by the light paint and intentional object movement.
This might look or resemble to double exposure technique but in this case, everything is captured in that one shot, the whole composition is completed in one shot. There’s a gratifying amount of complexity in this process, the object needs to act and understand each step of the performance, play it back in the head and paint with the body in complete darkness. Yes, the body becomes the brush. Like dragging your body randomly soaked in light paint, over a canvas of darkness, and understanding that the slightest move will paint something on the pitch-black canvas.
I’m still exploring intentional object movement, and as I listen to William Basinki’s, El Camino Real (El Camino Real, an Album by William Basinski. Released in May 2007, rateyourmusic.com), I realize that it has become my preferred technique as it captures performance, and all the spontaneity it brings, like a fragment of theater, looped forever on a photograph. Contrasted to current artificial intelligence surrealism, where transmutation is activated by a common online nightmare, I prefer to stay closer to the analogue side of the creative spectrum, avoiding a hyperbolic imaginarium.
