the pictorial – Marco Montalto

Ego sum, Ego existo

The human eye does not always see in the same way that the photography apparatus sees (here by the term photography apparatus we mean its common iterations, such as film cameras, medium format cameras, DSLR cameras, mirrorless cameras, bridge cameras, compact digital cameras, smartphone cameras, action cameras, etc.). I can be shown an image of…

Infra

Hearing is vision, othered. At some point in history, increasing image resolution started to only have an effect on film, leaving negligible obvious impact on photography. That is tantamount to saying that with the tremendous increase in image resolution evinced in the last decade or so, perceived motion happened to have been affected more drastically…

I(:) met you

Picture yourself in an art gallery eyeing the mysterious beauty of some post-modern painterly disaster hanging on one of the gallery walls. Conceive now the world you are standing in, the very same world that holds in its bosom those atrocious paintings hanging on the gallery walls, as one unitary painterly mess. Yourself now, as Pantocrator,…

The Lugubrious Game

In my last blog post (click here to read), I made my most concrete attempt to date at defining ‘the photographic’. In that blog post, I argued to the effect that ‘the photographic’ is the simulacrum. Implied emphasis on the use of the definite article preceding the word simulacrum should not be taken lightly, for…

The Crucible

The photographic is the act of recognition. The pictorial is the look that makes us want to (keep on) look(ing). Photographs and paintings can both evince the photographic. A photograph can labour to attain the pictorial. A painting necessarily evinces primarily the pictorial. But is it wholly correct to say that a painting necessarily evinces…

A brief history of photography (and painting)

By: montaltomarco January 22, 2020February 5, 2020

Blogbaroque, consciousness, history, human eye, painterly, painting, Perugino, photography, Poussin, renaissance, the photographic, the pictorial, time, worldLeave a Comment

Let us conceptualise in our minds two worlds: a big world and a small world. The small world lies engulfed in the big world. The big world is none other than the world we are embedded in at the moment. The small world, which lies buried deep within the big real world, is somewhat spherical…

Sustainable Prospects – Week 6

In this blog post, I would like to focus my attention on the work of a photographer I discovered recently and whose work I found highly pertinent to my writings about representation in photography. In her project, ‘Early American’, artist Sharon Core, carefully reproduced in real-life the subject matter contained in certain paintings by American…

Sustainable Prospects – Week 4

By: montaltomarco October 20, 2019January 8, 2021

MA Photography, Sustainable Prospectsdynamics, editing, Falmouth Flexible, Falmouth University, MA Photography, online learning, Photoshop, post-processing, printing, realism, the photographic, the pictorialLeave a Comment

During the current module of studies, I have finally started giving post-processing methods some serious thought… and some use. I had planned that during this module I would produce work in relation to my final major project that stood least in my control (see more about this here). I foresaw myself producing work that significantly…