Visual Abstraction and Photography

As a student, my first interest was researching the iconography of abstract aesthetics to understand the avant-garde photographic (1) and pictorial (2) movements. With my gaze directed towards the floor or approaching the architectural structures, I captured images of decontextualised fragments of the scenes and sought the iconicity of the volumes and textures, as well as the interplay of light and shadow.

Black and white images required imagination, as that was not what you saw through the camera's viewfinder. During the photographic laboratory process (3), with the development of the negative and positive, the image was created on photosensitive paper. The image was personalised by illuminating the negative in the enlarger (4) and adjusting the exposure on the positive photographic paper to lighten or darken areas of the image. Once the process was complete, it was possible to check whether the final image matched the imagined photograph or not.