P h o t o G r a p h i c w o r k s b y T h a n o s N . S t a s i n o p o u l o s
| The
works The digital
images exhibited here come from photographs printed on plain paper through
a scanner and a personal computer. Thanos
N. Stasinopoulos is an architect, working in building & interior
design & construction in Athens.
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Some
thoughts
As a young boy I used to wonder: "How do plants perceive their environment, with whatever kind of senses they might have?"; "How many things exist around us that we don't even suspect about because we do not possess the required senses?"... Later I read about Plato's "cave", with the "shadows" of cosmic reality projected on its walls and us struggling to interpret them in our fervour to solve the universe puzzle. Somehow we have managed to expand our understanding of Cosmos, either by advances in mental processing of those "shadows", or due to technology that enriches our senses -especially vision. So now we know a few more things about e.g. the infrared world, the plankton or distant galaxies. Yet, we still do not "see" all things around us, being prisoners of our senses and the limitations of human thought for centuries. But there is no doubt that we are surrounded and influenced by invisible forces, conditions or even beings, that perhaps we will comprehend some day, as it has happened already with magnetic fields or bacteria. It is that kind of thinking that I try to depict -and evoke- with my pictures. That's why their usual subject is fragments of the environment, visible to all, as they appear through the contemporary extension of the eye, the camera lens, enhanced through adjustments at the near end of the visual axis. The simple "click" of the shutter, which freezes an aspect of reality, encompasses or acquires elements that exalt conventional vision: Isolation of details (like in the microscope), transformation of colours (like in infrared photos), or disclosure of new forms (like in x-rays). From the aspect of revealing an "alternative" look of the world around us, my pictures are not far from scientific imagery, like e.g. axonic tomography or satellite photos. The difference is that my task is not a quantitative analysis ("The tumour is that big" or "Wheat production in China is that much"), but a rather poetic depiction of hidden dimensions of reality. This approach differs from the one pronounced by the forms of abstract painting: They are products of a purely mental conception which is expressed by human-made pictures following the creator's impulse and skill. The influence of technology, through the paintbrush or chemistry of colours, is limited. By contrast, my pictures are a direct projection of reality itself, like every photograph. Through subsequent processing, a number of "filters" are added, based on personal choice and objectives. The basic instrument -deliberately autonomous sometimes- is the highlight of contemporary technology, the computer, guided according to its operating rules. TNS 1998 |
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