“I think that a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary image will be key to understanding contemporary culture. In a society whose communication is increasingly image based, where all of those images share the same means of production, it would seem to me that we are obliged to pose a critical investigation into that production and see what ideological subtext might be contained there; to sift out the presence of a soft, incidental set of pathways that do not so much inhibit certain kinds of production as much as they readily facilitate others.”
— from A Conversation with Joshua Citarella
Lorenzo Durantini - Colorama Studies
Changes in how we encounter the materiality of photographic images have led to some innovative re-imagining of their physical presence and for Lorenzo Durantini this often takes the form of an elaborate installation. In his series Colorama Studies he uses this studio background material, which is usually intended to be neutral, and reshapes it in such a way that its presence within the image actually becomes the meaning - the effect here is to reveal those hidden conditions that shape the photograph. He shows the space of the studio so that the constructions do not retreat into abstraction, but rather are grounded in the immediate conditions of photographic production. This image especially suggests an absent subject (presumably the X on the floor is where they would stand), while the “interlacing” of the paper backdrop may well be a reference to the now standard pixel structure of photographic viewing.
