The Image Hunter: capturing dreams
By Sejin Cheong
On October 16, I attended Photo New York–an exciting event, the walls were filled. Even though the scale of the fair was not so large, there was an enormous variety of work: vivid colors, and large format images immediately caught my eye. And then, I came across photographs by Gory (Rogelio Lopez Marin). I was struck by his work. Compared to the loud color photos, his muted images held another kind of power. He combined strange and unusual images, surrealism and reality, composition and color, literature and painting. I wanted to learn more.
Sejin Cheong: Part of what struck me about your images at Photo New York was the balance and organization of your. I read that you were originally a painter. How has that influenced your photography and the way you approach composition?
Gory: I think that my work has always been inter-related, the painting with the photography and the photography with the painting. As I did train as a painter in school, composition is very important to me, something that I care about a great deal. On the other hand, I see photography as capturing a "decisive moment" and I?m very traditional in this view. I go out with my camera as an image hunter. I take what I have found. I never make arrangements in the objects to change the composition. But at the same time, I take my photos in black and white, and I use a restricted selection of colors, hand-made with chemical toners, over the prints. So, in this case, I go back to being a painter except not with pigments, but with chemicals.
SC: I have also read critics that call your work "Surrealist" –How do you feel about this label? Would you call yourself a Surrealist?
G: It is a constant interest of mine to look and find paradoxical situations in reality, situations similar in ambience to those I create in my paintings and in my photomontages. I love the work of Rene Magritte, where the Surrealism is at the same time Conceptualism, sometimes only a paradox more than something unreal.
SC: You seem to combine images of daily life with surreal elements, making everyday images seem strange. We all see taxi doors and kitchen knives, how do you make us rediscover them? give them meaning?
G: Of course all these images have meaning. That?s why I told you that I have a great interest in images that looks surreal, at first view. The images that you mentioned were taken the same week of the September 11 tragedy in Brooklyn and New York. I believe that both images illustrate exactly how I felt in this moment with the tragedy of our country. The sense of isolation that I felt on September 12, walking through Fifth Avenue is recalled in the images of the taxi?s doors that I took in a junk yard in Brooklyn; and the image of the knives flying in the sky between the buildings with a mysterious, faceless human figure dressed in black represent the violence that came flying through the air some days before. I think that sometimes a surrealistic image can speak better about the reality because it has a symbolic and allegorical charge.
SC: I read an article by Andy Brumer in which he linked your work to Garcia Lorca’s poetry. In what ways might poetry influence visual art?
G: I don?t know the article that you mention, but it is interesting because I have made a lot of work related to poetry and to literature. In the case of the poetry, I made many photographs and a small series with poems by my wife, Lucia Ballester, my preferred poet. Of my more reproduced works, a series of nine photomontages from 1986 inspired by a book of Adolfo Bioy Casares, a great writer from Argentina, was accompanied with a text of the German writer Michael Ende. So literature and poetry really do influence my work.
SC: What projects are you working on now?
G: Many people told me that I?m going backwards with my actual project of building a very comfortable dark room in the age of the digital photography, but I really love the traditional photographic process, the creativity of the dark room and the possibility of the chemicals. The other new project is to go away with my camera or my brush like a hunter in this dialogue where the reality says what you need to take in a process that has a lot of fun and much to discover.
