tower of the silent

A writer needs to read like a musician needs to listen music to enrich their own technique. In the same way a photographer needs to look at photos to expand his imagination. Currently, artists are multifaceted because they blend techniques and styles from the other disciplines. For example, or contemporary dance can use architecture, music combines visual art, or writing can blend with illustration. For that reason, artist, designers, musician, filmmakers and other creators have opened the borders to find new ways of expression. 

Mary Anne Mitchell is a multifaceted artist that use photography, video and fine art in her work. She has a very particular technique because in her photographic process she uses an historic technique called collodion from 19^th century, and this process had application in the beginning of photography. Collodion is a chemical solution mixed with ether and alcohol that is sensitive to light, and the result is an image in black and white. She uses a special camera to take her photos. Therefore, her process is totally analog. On the other hand, she makes an installation where space is intervened with photos and videos. All these processes give more power to the information that she wants to share with viewers, and viewers experiment other senses with her work. 

Her work evokes situations, often mysterious. Her most recent series is Meet me in my Dreams.

When I took this picture, I remember I felt her voice to resound the strongest that made my soul vibrate. The song she was singing brought me a lot of memories from the past, it was the first time I felt nostalgia. “we are an impossible dream that seeks night.” abstract from the song “Somos”

Concha Buika is a mixture between Europa and Africa. Her music fuses other genres like Tango, Salsa, Ranchera, Bolero, jazz with her Flamenco voice. Also, her lyrics are about love and loneliness.  

In 2016, I had the opportunity to listen to a Concha Buika in the Barranquilla Jazz festival from Colombia. I remember that the first thing she did was drop a bit of tequila drink on the floor and after she drank a drink. Then she said, “I took the fear and put it in a glass with a tequila drink, and then I drank it.” “Drink this bottle with me, and the last drink you kiss me” abstract from the song “El ùltimo trago.”

I was so excited during the concert because I was very close to her, and I saw as her feelings were changing with the beats of the music. “I was about to change your world by my world…….. Your love was not fire” abstract from the song “las Ciudades.”

So, I am going to recommend this album “El ultimo Trago” If you want, you could drink a tequila to enjoy quietly her music.

Photography is a result of our mind. Our brains built our vision, therefore all people see different things, and reality can be interpreted in many ways, so reality is subjective. When our mind is limited our reality can be a cage. 

Art has played with fiction to represent reality. Reality and fiction have the same essence, and sometimes they can become confused. 

The great works from photography have always been long process, and they are going to find new means when photographer start to expand his researches.  

The installation “24 HRS in Photos” by Erik Kessels at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a room filled with prints made from photos uploaded to Flickr during a 24-hour period in 2011.

Now, photography has been changing its way from conventional formats leaving galleries as the only space to show work. Contemporary photography has taken new formats to interact with viewers, and it gives more information about its work.  

Photobooks are unique objects that photographers are using to tell stories that sometimes these can be surreal like poetry. Telling stories with images can be like to write. Each images can do us to feel a sensation and these would go changing with passage of the leaves. When you have a photobook in your hand, you have contact with the work-art and this can give us another meaning. Also, it can be interpreted in many ways, and over time images can take another meaning.  These works have a creative process that may include the contribution of writers, poets, designers, anthropologists or different researchers. 

Afronauts 

This Photobook tells a science fiction story. The author Cristina de Middel finds news about a space travel project from Africa, so she traveled there to research this. She doesn’t find anything, just old newspapers. So here her idea was born and she rebuilt this story.     

Have a Nice Book is my website recommendation to start an exploration about photobooks.

Yesterday I found some pictures on the internet about women that had been in a mental Hospital in the 19th century. Those pictures had been taken by Dr Hugh Welch Diamond in England. He had taken those pictures because he believed through photography, if he could confront the crazy women with their own portraits it could make them come out of their madness. He was described as pseudoscientific (a fake scientist).

I believe that photography could have a therapeutic power for all people that like to make images as well as for the viewers that like to see them. Photography helps me to understand my own madness. When I take a photo, this encloses my thoughts. In other words, one picture can contain my ideas, the music I listen to, the movies I have watched, the books I have read, the paintings I have seen, the food I have eaten, the things I have lost, everything in my head. All those create my view, my own interpretation of the world. So, when someone looks a photo, and this can connect any idea or evoke anything in another person from the therapeutic power from the images work is working.  

Lewis Carroll wrote “here we are all crazy, but only in a few, delirium reaches intolerable dimension.” 

The Pixies Where is my mind?

One good way to explore a city is using its public transportation. Atlanta has a metro called MARTA, and this metro goes across the city north to south and west to east.

I like to use the metro because I can see all kinds of people, and my pictures focus on every day, so here I can find this. I think what is here a complex world about the culture of the city. 

On the train people are doing other activities like eating, sleeping, reading, studying because the trips many times are long. When I am in the train, I think that the bodies of the people are here but their minds are unplugged.

Sociologists have defined this social phenomenon like a floating population which is the construction of action in a dead time. I want to make narrative reflections through the pictures about bodies in space.  

My name is Edwin Amado. I an Architect and Photographer from Colombia. I have been living in Atlanta for some months while I am learning my second language. I like to define myself as an audiovisual researcher because I believe through photography I can make personal exploration about things around me. I like to think about the world with pictures. Also, pictures can transmit emotions and feelings and connect us without using our language. Behind the pictures, there will always be a story that can be told. 

Among my more important works there are two short multimedia documentaries on line. The first is called Torres del silencio (https://vimeo.com/214424144?ref=em-share ) about one of the big social problems in Colombia, which is the arms conflict and farmers have moved from the countryside to city to save their lives. This work was awarded with a POY LATAM 2017 (photographer of the year Iberoamérica) The second, is a project about river turtle biology research in the eastern flats Colombia ( https://youtu.be/0MECVOs8zfs ). Inaddition, this work was made into a book called El Galapago Sabanero. 

ABOUT THIS SITE:

This place is an experiment where pictures and texts are connected and both tell stories about my experience here, so during this time I have stored a lot of photos, videos, sounds and drawings, and the best way of building a story is creating a blog as if it were some kind of personal diary of a traveler.