IMPOSSIBLE NAPLES PROJECT
by Marco Maraviglia
In 2000, I deserted film and the darkroom altogether and converted to digital. I spent many hours experimenting with Photoshop to understand the opportunities it could offer me.
At that time, I scanned slides of my photographic archive because picture editors weren’t accepting the slide storage sheets and preferred digital format images instead. It was the era of noisy 56k modem, ISDN and FTP. Then looking at my photos on the monitor side by side, I started to imagine them fused with each other and carved into pieces that entered into another mental fantasy. I felt a sensation of separation between the metaphysical and the surreal.
At the beginning, I wasn’t very satisfied with my first photo manipulation and assemblage experiments. In time, I perfected the selection tools and functions I still use today to make photomontages. Each performance of “impossible” images has processing times that last more than a month as does “Gallery” (Tribute to Escher) and “Da nessuna parte”. Metamorfosi Reloaded, however, has had a ten-year preparation period and has now been completed thanks to the suggestions of the “Metamorfosi friends”.
I hardly ever have something specific in mind. I imagine something which is indefinite somewhere and unclear. I take parts of some photos from my archive and piece them together with others, as I followed a “Pollock-automatism” flow.
Then, the image takes shape gradually and only after checking each detail; the clipping paths have to be perfect and the work has to make sense fully. It is not just a graphic virtuosity game. Parts of places and monuments have to be assembled as a homogeneous, realistic and surreal collage, without any blurs or abstractionism. Visible inexistences - a kind of “contemporary visionary”.
While I’m working on my photographic compositions, I realize that the stress caused by “The Great Ugliness” fades away. Cutting images which are often complex, becomes as a Zen exercise that trains my patience and psychological endurance, helping me face the adversities of life peacefully. Therapeutic photography – one might say? For me, it is too.
The images are made through a different lens of Naples. It is a visual perception, which stimulates the recognition of the city details that go unnoticed even by people who live there.
“….Imagine a dream or old memories. You will see that everything is blended, everything is disassembled, everything overlaps or vanishes and the physicality of lived spaces is sublimated by essential elements, perhaps metaphorical, maybe unnecessary, … and everything is distorted. Impossible Naples is a challenge. We need to “sharpen the view” as we do with the newspaper-based “find-the-differences” pictorial puzzle.
Dismantle, cut, reassemble and you get a surreal Naples. Sometimes metaphysical. A Napoli to recognize to know it.
© Marco Maraviglia
Translation: Anhony Iacomino
by Marco Maraviglia
In 2000, I deserted film and the darkroom altogether and converted to digital. I spent many hours experimenting with Photoshop to understand the opportunities it could offer me.
At that time, I scanned slides of my photographic archive because picture editors weren’t accepting the slide storage sheets and preferred digital format images instead. It was the era of noisy 56k modem, ISDN and FTP. Then looking at my photos on the monitor side by side, I started to imagine them fused with each other and carved into pieces that entered into another mental fantasy. I felt a sensation of separation between the metaphysical and the surreal.
At the beginning, I wasn’t very satisfied with my first photo manipulation and assemblage experiments. In time, I perfected the selection tools and functions I still use today to make photomontages. Each performance of “impossible” images has processing times that last more than a month as does “Gallery” (Tribute to Escher) and “Da nessuna parte”. Metamorfosi Reloaded, however, has had a ten-year preparation period and has now been completed thanks to the suggestions of the “Metamorfosi friends”.
I hardly ever have something specific in mind. I imagine something which is indefinite somewhere and unclear. I take parts of some photos from my archive and piece them together with others, as I followed a “Pollock-automatism” flow.
Then, the image takes shape gradually and only after checking each detail; the clipping paths have to be perfect and the work has to make sense fully. It is not just a graphic virtuosity game. Parts of places and monuments have to be assembled as a homogeneous, realistic and surreal collage, without any blurs or abstractionism. Visible inexistences - a kind of “contemporary visionary”.
While I’m working on my photographic compositions, I realize that the stress caused by “The Great Ugliness” fades away. Cutting images which are often complex, becomes as a Zen exercise that trains my patience and psychological endurance, helping me face the adversities of life peacefully. Therapeutic photography – one might say? For me, it is too.
The images are made through a different lens of Naples. It is a visual perception, which stimulates the recognition of the city details that go unnoticed even by people who live there.
“….Imagine a dream or old memories. You will see that everything is blended, everything is disassembled, everything overlaps or vanishes and the physicality of lived spaces is sublimated by essential elements, perhaps metaphorical, maybe unnecessary, … and everything is distorted. Impossible Naples is a challenge. We need to “sharpen the view” as we do with the newspaper-based “find-the-differences” pictorial puzzle.
Dismantle, cut, reassemble and you get a surreal Naples. Sometimes metaphysical. A Napoli to recognize to know it.
© Marco Maraviglia
Translation: Anhony Iacomino
