Photography by Milan Padilla
Some years ago when I started going to art galleries, I always shook my head when I saw works named “untitled”. To me, this was simply a demonstration that the author just had no real concept in mind and wanted to get away with it by leaving no indication for interpretation – I drastically changed my mind years later.
The image above shows Hachiko crossing in front of Tokyos Shibuya station, where around three million people get on and off trains every single day. As the traffic lights are set for cars to move, pedestrians gather along sides of the streets. Then it all discharges and masses of people flood the crossing from all sides at once. It’s a famous enchanting spectacle of modern society and humanity that I could watch for hours at a time.This of course challenged me to capture the essence of it in a still frame.
This photograph depicts the head of a tuna that was used as a spectacular means of decoration in a banquet dinner on a conference in Matsue, western Japan. The raw meat of the fish was sliced into convenient pieces of sashimi, conveniently placed around the head so that guests could pick them up with chopsticks while looking at the deceased animal.
Continue reading “Between fascination and disgust”
Human beings are for many photographers the main subject of their images, whereas in my photography, humans are often just simply part of a more general composition. Having spent several months in Japan, I feel how humanist photography is something I have neglected for so long.
The picture above shows a couple of young Japanese people watching the great summer fireworks festival in Nagoya, central Japan. It was very warm that night and several hundred thousand people had gathered at the harbour area to watch the astonishing show of light and music in the summer sky. Although this spectacle was easily the most impressive fireworks show I had ever seen, in retrospective, this is the principle photograph I personally retain from the event because of the human nature within it.
Since LvxPhotography.net went online about two years ago, my biggest personal motivation was to learn how to write meaningful texts about particular images and ideas I discovered in photography. Most times I choose an image that makes me think of a concept, then I write a brief text and after a few revisions I post it online. However, I often still have difficulties to express myself in words as to why I would like to post something like this collage you see above.
This collage shows three impressions from Japan in an unconventional format. The ensemble is more than the sum of each part and also remindes myself that, after all, photography is more about feeling than about words.
The so-called blue hour is a concept that shows well how natural light coming from the sky changes over time. Each minute throughout the day natural light changes and thus contrast, shadows, colors and tones of photos. Some landscape photographers rightfully claim that, when the sky is clear, great pictures can only be taken after sunrise or before sunset, when the light is soft and the colors are warm. In urban environments, the blue hour is a very particular time to photograph cityscapes in the timeframe between sunset and the darkness of the night.
When Japanese tourists travel through Europe, they seem to spent their whole time taking pictures completely banal stuff as if everything was exciting and worth capturing. A lot of people have this stereotype image of Asian tourists. We smile, perhaps thinking how ridiculous their touristic behaviour is. But it’s not that simple.
Some photographic image are not only describable by it’s composition, content, context, colors but in terms of what I call “the look”. There are many looks (or styles) of images I can think of, such as the grainy look from old film, the Polaroid look with it’s crappy colors, the sepia look, the blurry look and much more. Many magnificent photographers, like Martin Parr for example, have a look to their image, that is even unique to them. It’s about styling an image up to be visually different from the standard settings through colors, techniqual tweaks and exposures.
Photoshop is something I have never really gotten into. For a long time I thought the program was something for graphic designers and that photographers don’t necessarily need it, since Photoshop goes much deeper than any photograph would require. Additionally, I didn’t like the idea of manipulating images in a way, that you delete objects on your photo, strech out pieces of land and sky to remove unwanted things from your landscape, or even change the shape of peoples faces and bodies etc.
This is a test for a standard wordpress excerpt in my theme
Photography has come a long way since it was invented over one and a half centuries ago. Photographs are produced and consumed for private, professional and artistic purposes. When you think of photographs as a product for visual consumption (memories, decoration, entertainment, documentation etc.) you can also look at them from an economic perspective, namely in terms of demand and supply.
