cefvigo gallery
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POSTAIS DUN SOÑOIn a time when technology is becoming more and more present in our society, making us dependent on it even in the most basic aspects of our lives, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen expresses herself through a stenopeic camera built by herself with a simple cardboard box. Since the end of the seventies, when she started working in the series Expeditions , she has never abandoned stenopeic photography although she also uses a conventional camera as a complement, or even digital technology, like in her latest work The Phases of the Moon, some of whose pictures are shown in this book. The qualities of a stenopeic camera, such as the infinite depth of field or the blurred aspect caused by the use of the paper as a negative, allow her to get extraordinarily evocative images, a characteristic which defines all her work.
Her series are characterised by the enormous richness of cultural references which cover aspects of the most varied fields, references which are sometimes related to the history of photograph. In Expeditions, for example, she plays a tribute to the pioneers of topographic photography of the 19th century and at the same time she parodies them by subverting their use of the photographic scale. In this way we are able to travel in our imagination to a world where the particular references to the classical Mediterranean culture (something which has always attracted her greatly), are mixed with aspects of the contemporary Western culture, such as planes or movie characters. She pays great attention to the symbolic character of the elements that are included in her carefully built images.
The pictorial references are unavoidable, specially those referring to the surrealism or to the romantic painting in the series Gates, The Phases of the Moon and Songs of the Sea, works where the water and the fog create an atmosphere both mysterious and magic. In her work Pazos (Vigo, 1996), these elements appear mixtured with architectural remains which take us to an imaginary travel into the past.
Manuel Sendón
Xosé Luis Suárez Canal