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Claudio Santambrogio
Untitled
[Shadows]
2016-2019
Platinum print
Provided by the artist - Claudio Santambrogio
LL/89477
Shadows
When making a photograph, that is to say, a drawing with light, I am less concerned with “reality”. What interests me more is to find the afterimage, or “shadow image” we have of it – photography is a research on time, perception, and memory, and it therefore has also a very tight connection to absence.
A photograph is more than just an image – the seductive beauty of photographs is slowly vanishing in today's world, replaced by the ever-glossy screen. All that is left of photographs is images. A true photograph is a magical evocation and its artistic and material qualities in equal measure to the transformation of the subject into something more than just itself. The laborious processes from the very early years of the history of photography are part of my alchemy to conjure up vanished memories, the magic of presenting “the appearance of what was absent”.
The photographs are thus primarily objects on paper – they are the shadow, made tangible, of the paper itself.
Shadows is a series of platinum prints on sundry Japanese papers, in various sizes. The sensitized paper was left to dry with all its natural creases and then exposed to oblique light, which draws the shadows of each crease onto itself. Once flattened and prepared, the paper maintains the memory of its creased surface texture.
(Claudio Santambrogio, Received, pers. email, March 2019)
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