| These photographic series both deal with, although in different ways, the idea of veering photography away from reality. |  |
Manuel Villanueva
These photographic series both deal with, although in different ways, the idea of veering photography away from reality. Haiku, which I have been working on since 2003, is based on the short form of composition in Japanese poetry, which restricts the length of expression to 17 syllables in three verses. Due to the shortness of these poems, the haiku writer uses imagery to communicate a sort of abrupt knowledge that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what he is describing. In its most basic form, the haiku contains two elements: what is written, and the hidden sense that only appears to the reader as an unconfirmed possibility, an invisible evocation, or an emotion. I follow this structure when I take my images away from their supposed context and combine them in triptychs, showing something apart from what is been photographed and giving the viewer the opportunity to construct, rather than expect, a reality.
In Naturans, which is a concept that understands nature as a creative and permanent changing substance, the digital technology helps to veer, again, the images away from their so-called origin. This project, which I began in 2005, is a critical essay on the idea of nature as something we can simply destroy, cultivate, or conserve.
Photography has always been—apart from some practical and theoretical exceptions—a transport for a given situation, object, human being, or animal which, despite the subjectivity or the technology, is supposed to exist beyond the camera and therefore supposed to exist beyond the image, leaving a sort of hope in the expecting mind of the spectator.
Talking about photography as an abstract art, on the other hand, would lead to a conversation about either a lack of reference or a delayed recognition of something hiding behind the image. Haiku and Naturans deal with photography as a form of thought, as visual essays on a given problem or idea. These series intend to elevate the spectator, giving the viewer the opportunity to use the images as an inspiration for his own reality, not as something that has happened away from him.
