Barbara Luisi

Dreamland

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

An elegant journey with Barbara Luisi and her her fascinating use of light.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: CONTRASTO
• Seitenzahl: 96
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. September 2014
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 310mm x 279mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 1020g
• ISBN-13: 9788869655005
• ISBN-10: 8869655008
• Artikelnr.: 40586274

Autorenporträt

Barbara Luisi was born in Munich in 1964. At the age of 9 years she began studying the violin. After graduating from "Munich Arts and Music Highschool” she studied the violin at "Hochschule für Musik und Theater” in Munich and obtained the Concert Diploma. She performed professionally for many years in several leading European orchestras; the Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre du Capitol de Toulouse, Bayerische Staatsoper and she was first violinist in the "Pocci String Quartet”. These years of music stimulated and reinforced her sensitivities and her eye for the irretrievable moment. The visual images which she experienced in music were soon applied to her interest in photography. At the age of 17 years she began photography experimenting with a Leica M6 and developed her work in her own darkroom. Since that time she has dedicated her attention fully to photography. She has engaged in portraiture often relating to theatre and music, stillife, nightlight and the human body . There have been many exhibitions of her work; Musikverein in Vienna, Geneva's Victoria Hall, the Semperoper in Dresden etc, as well as galleries in Europe, USA and Japan.

Inhaltsangabe

Of sea and of sky
The image of the world is half the world.
He who possesses the world but not its image
possesses only half the world, since
his soul is poor and has nothing.
The wealth of the soul exists in images.
Carl Gustav Jung - Liber Novus
Describing the wonders of photography, as well as the quantity and quality
of the images shown in the exhibition of the Société française de
photographie in 1857, Ernest Lacan was particularly impressed by the work
of Gustave Le Gray. Not only, and not so much because he found the images
in different parts of the exhibition with varying subjects, but above all
because he was impressed by the great French photographer's incredible,
extraordinary seascapes. Of course views of beaches and shorelines were
subjects that were not new even in the history of photography, nevertheless
Le Gray's images seemed capable arousing surprise in visitors, even the
most knowledgeable. A careful and diligent reporter, Lacan seems to admire
the series of new images, hung on the walls and born of a mixture of
brilliance and ability, contemplation and immediacy, slow and precise
construction of the view and technical skill. Far removed from any desire
for the sketchy, from every conceivable impulse towards the picturesque, Le
Gray's images appeared different to anything seen until then and capable of
rendering, according to accounts, a truthful but overturned view of nature.
In his report, Lacan notes that in those huge expanses of water ruffled by
the wind, the ships devoid of sails still continue to sail without
stopping. The rough seas, the high waves, the clouds heavy with rain, the
rays of sunlight that bring the landscape to life: everything is
astonishing, to the extent that Le Gray's seascapes are, comparison aside,
completely different to anything done before.
What is different is certainly the great competence, the ability to combine
together different negatives in order to produce new creations in which the
balance between the various parts has something of the miraculous about it.
But above all, the great novelty lies in the act that the photograph now
overwhelmingly demands of the viewer. Whoever finds himself before these
images should not be asking where the place is - sometimes it is
recognizable, sometimes not - but how can he reach it. It is not
recognition that is demanded, nor silent approval, but emotion. We gaze at
the image and we are there, feeling the wind on our face, the churning of
the waves. We dive into the glare of the sunlight on the surface of the
water and we abandon ourselves to the view. We, too, contemplate the
landscape and through this contemplation, become part of it.
This is where the novelty of Le Gray's vision lies - a novelty he shares
with the painting of the period: emotion bursts powerfully into the image
and transforms a view of sea and sky into the possibility, for the
observer, of experiencing something personal and profound. Of feeling
himself part of nature, with all the psychological turmoil this immersion
entails, from dizziness to the loss of identity.
Barbara Luisa has recently created a series of remarkable marine scenes.
Opting more often that not for nocturnal views, she has decided to immerse
herself in a dreamlike world and to offer us the significant moments of her
presence, seemingly restful but certainly with eyes wide open, in that
realm between dream and wakefulness, when the surrounding landscape becomes
the place of mind and body in which to experience profound contemplation.
When everything pervades and envelops us.
In her plates, colour is confused and confuses us. In the dark, we glimpse
parts of sky, sea, land. Even though we recognize elements that are
familiar, we see them transformed and interpreted in a surprising way.
These are images that force us to stop, almost asserting themselves before
our eyes with some ancient and unexpected force. They call on us not to
pass distractedly but to remain attentive and to observe. To observe in
silence.
Barbara Luisa is a musician and has made the interpretation of music the
keystone of her experience in the world. A score exists; it is waiting for
a musician to play it, to bring it alive, to re-actualize the score in a
fresh, original reading. Something that was silent before but that now
becomes vivid proof of existence, an opportunity for exchange and
participation in all that the score contains within it, including emotions
and the sense of living.
In the same way, the world exists and waits for the photographer to offer a
fresh, original, profound interpretation of it. An interpretation that
succeeds in expressing that feeling both of proximity and distance, that
fortunate headiness of the loss of identity, which can only be the prelude
to a different and more conscious identity, now more complete.
The series Dreamland is exactly this: a contemplation of the images of the
world we know, in which we move and which we frequent, albeit perhaps only
in the "protected" and daytime hours, but which we now see in a new way, in
the highly personal and profound interpretation the photographer offers us.
It is her images of the world that fill our soul.
From Le Gray onwards, the theme of the seascape has attracted the great
exponents of photography who have sought in the immensity of the surfaces,
in the possible distance of the gaze, in the atmosphere that envelops and
then unites sky and sea, that possibility of training the eye to be both
involved and distant, profoundly immersed in what it is experiencing but
nevertheless remote, in some "third" world. An exercise that lies at the
basis of the photographer's task: to contemplate and to participate.
Barbara Luisi is moving in this direction too, combining the acts of
contemplation and participation in an independent and original manner,
touching with a steady hand the chords of reality at the point in which the
line of the sea and that of the sky connect; in the long stretches of sand
that fade into the distance, in the cold tropical scenes in the light of
dawn, in the magnificent and dreadful storms on the high seas, as though
they were the notes of a score. A score that exists, it's true. But that no
one up until now has been able to release, with sounds and images, in such
a complete and fascinating way.
Alessandra Mauro