Massimiliano Muner

Respirare step #0 - Massimiliano Muner Polaroid Abstract Photography Composition

2014

Untitled, Unique photograph. Center panel from larger scale installation. Shot in the 20X24 format. (this measures about 20X20 inches) Ellen Carey, American artist and photographer. Ellen Carey resides in Hartford, Connecticut, and teaches at the Hartford Art School. She holds a B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri, and an M.F.A. from State University of New York at Buffalo. Her photographs have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, including the International Center for Photography, New York and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has received many grants from her home state of Connecticut as well as the Massachusetts Council of the Arts, New Works Grant, New York State Federation for Artists Grant; and a National Endowment for the Arts Award. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum of Arts; Chase Manhattan Bank; Coca Cola Corporation; Fogg Art Museum; George Eastman House; International Center for Photography; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Abstract photography, sometimes called non-objective, experimental, conceptual or concrete photography, is a means of depicting a visual image that does not have an immediate association with the object world and that has been created through the use of photographic equipment, processes or materials. Some photographers pushed the boundaries of conventional imagery by incorporating the visions of surrealism or futurism into their work. Man Ray, Maurice Tabard, André Kertész, Curtis Moffat and Filippo Masoero were some of the best known artists who produced startling imagery that questioned both reality and perspective. Both during and after World War II photographers such as Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Henry Holmes Smith and Lotte Jacobi explored compositions of found objects in ways that demonstrated even our natural world has elements of abstraction embedded in it. Beginning in the late 1970s photographers stretched the limits of both scale and surface in what was then traditional photographic media that had to be developed in a darkroom. Inspired by the work of Moholy-Nagy, Susan Rankaitis first began embedding found images from scientific textbooks into large-scale photograms. By the 1990s a new wave of photographers were exploring the possibilities of using computers to create new ways of creating photographs. Photographers such as Thomas Ruff, Barbara Kasten, Tom Friedman, and Carel Balth were creating works that combined photography, sculpture, printmaking and computer-generated images. Any boundaries that remained between pure artists and pure photographers were eliminated by individuals who worked exclusively in photography but produced only computer-generated images. Among the most well-known of the early 21st century generation were Gaston Bertin...

Henry and the Jelly Fish (Stay) with Ryan Gosling - 2006 128x125cm, Edition of 5 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on the original Polaroid. Signature label and certificate. Artist Inventory Number 5501. Not mounted. ------------------------------------------------ A piece of art from the movie 'Stay' by Stefanie Schneider Stefanie created the art for both main actors Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling in the movie 'Stay' directed by Marc Forster. She also created the art for several dream sequences and the end credit sequence for the movie. “I never remember the details of a Stefanie Schneider image, just the whole. She treads a third path between reality and dream that connects the two and truly sparks my artistic, visual freedom.” (Marc Forster) Torsten Scheid, “Fotografie, Kunst, Kino. Revisited.”, FilmDienst 3/2006, page 11-13

 Photography Art Cinema. Revisited Stay expands a traditional connection through new facets Interwoven between the media of photography and film is a veritable mesh-work of technical, motific, metaphorical and personal interrelationships. Extending from photo-film which, as in La Jetée by Chris Marker (France, 1962) is a montage of single, unmoving photographs all the way to the portrayal of photographic motifs in Hollywood cinema―most recently in Memento (USA, 2000) and One hour photo (USA, 2002)―is the range of filmic-photographic interactions on the one hand, and from the adaption of modes of cinematic production to the imitation of film stills on the other. For instance, with the legendary Untitled Film Stills (1978) of the American artist Cindy Sherman, who later made her debut as a film director with Office Killer (USA, 1997) and thereby, like many others, changed sides: Wim Wenders, Robert Frank and Larry Clark are doubtlessly the most successful of these photographic-filmic border crossers. This brief survey provides only a vague indication of the dimensions of this intermedial field, which in fact extends much further and is constantly being cultivated. Also as a motif in film, photography has experienced a historical transformation: Photographers were once considered to be technicians who mastered a craft but never achieved the status of artists. Photographer-figures were caught in the allure of beautiful appearance, incapable of penetrating to the actual essence of things. Such depth was reserved for literature or painting. When photography in film touched upon the sphere of art, then most often as its contrasting model, as the metaphor for a superficial access to the world. Coming to mind are Fred Astaire as a singing fashion photographer in Stanley Donen’s musical film Funny Face (USA, 1957), or the restless lifestyle-photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s genre-classic Blow up (GB, 1966). For the doubting Thomas, only that exists which can be photographed. He ultimately enters the world of fantasy and thereby the field of art only unwillingly, when he becomes entangled in the world of his images. The last of his detail-enlargements shows only the photographic grain and has lost all connection to reality. The photograph looks as if it had been painted by Bill, the painter who is both friend and antagonist to the protagonist.

 Photography as Art It was first around the end of the last century that numerous filmmakers discovered photography as a genuine art form. In The Bridges of Madison County (USA, 1995) a sensitive Clint Eastwood stands, camera in hand, on the threshold of artistic status, and in Smoke (USA, 1994) a tobacco merchant ripens into a philosopher through his involvement in photography. Finally, in John Water’s parody of the art market, Pecker (USA, 1998), a provincial tom-fool is hyped into celebrated stardom amid the New York art scene because of his blurred snapshots. This film about a postmodern Kaspar Hauser in photographic art (with clear parallels to Richard Billingham...