PRESS RELEASE (15/1/2015)
Saturday, Jan. 17, a Loano, at 4 p.m, at Civic Library (Kursaal Palace)will be held the conference entitled. “Photography Gets Big: The Masters of Straight Photography in the First Half of the 20th Century.‘.
The initiative, organized by the’UNITRE of Loano under the auspices of the Municipality of Loano, will see as speaker the expert Angelo Berrino.
“For us today, it is normal to attribute and recognize to photography its peculiarities and functions both of documentation (more or less faithful) of reality and of autonomous artistic expression. - explains Berrino - At its inception, however, this was not the case for photography: the new medium astonished the world with its extraordinary ability to depict reality but, because of the relative automaticity in its execution, there was a tendency to deny artistic prerogative to the photographer as if he, though good, was its mere technical executor.
This prompted photographers, in order to gain artistic recognition, to seek expedients to make their photographs take on pictorial atmospheres. (Pictorialism)
At the beginning of the 20th century, however, when avant-garde artists were scrambling in search of a new functional aesthetic, free from classical canons, to land in that unexplored terrain in which form adapts to function (Impressionism, Cubism...), behold, some American photographers, emancipating themselves from mother painting, ferried photography toward the use of a technique more consonant with the medium, freeing themselves from the influences of the past in favor of a production of pure, sharp, forthright images, devoid of artifice and for this reason original, spontaneous, and highly effective: the Direct Photography (Straight Photography).”
