Photography

Something about us - Volunteers Life

Art or language?

by Rodrigo Perezagua Escobar

Thatphotography is a medium of expression is a given, but can we reduce it to another language or category within art?

At Balkan Hotspot we are holding a photography workshop with our volunteers, whose job it is to give visibility to issues of social awareness, environment and good practices. So in this workshop we put the focus on what we want to transmit when we take a photograph, rather than on the beauty of the photographs. But of course we have to start by defining what photography is:

Collage

© Jon Ching

"It’s a way to express your feelings, I love photography”. Ezgi said.

“ For me photography is... uff, a way to create an image, an idea, a shape out of something else, is a way to keep face situations, and give to it a meaning, you can create basically everything with photography”. Máxime said.

“ A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know”.

“ The art or practice of taking and processing photographs”. Someone else claimed.

“ A picture made using a camera, in which an image is focused on to light-sensitive material and then made visible and permanent by chemical treatment, or stored digitally.”

“ Visual representation of data that transforms complex information into something easier to communicate, share, remember...”. I think.

Illustration

© Peggy diggs

Just as we do not become yogis just by going to yoga class twice a week, we are not photographers just because we take pictures of everything going on around us and document it on social media. To become a true Yogi, it is necessary to incorporate this philosophy into our daily lives, giving ways to meditate on every action or thought that arises in our minds, and then canalize and interpret it according to our own knowledge. The same thing happens with photography, because photographers analyze the world around them, and premeditatedly take a photo, to document something or communicate something specific.

The power of images is amazing, we all know the expression “a picture is worth a thousand words”, but have we ever stopped to think about its true meaning?

(Now I am going to propose a simple practice, so take a few seconds before reading on to think about it).

Mural

© Art is trash

- Describe in your own words the picture you like the most or the first one that comes to your mind.

- What barriers did you encounter?

- Which elements did you overlook and which ones did you give more importance to when describing the image?

Performance in Granada

© Rodrigo Perezagua

When trying to communicate something, in order to do it as effectively as possible, you first have to understand how the human brain works, and for that we can look to Gestalt theory on visual image weights.

Gestalt theory starts from some basic principles of correlation between sensory perception and brain process, in which we make sense of what we receive in such a way that emergence refers to what we see, reification to memory or recollections. Up to this point the logical part of our brain, when we do not get answers, we look for them in the artistic part of it, making room for multistability and invariance.

These principles gave way to the 7 laws of gestalt and later to the study of visual weights, that is to say, what is the first thing that gets your attention from an image.

Of course every person is different, and in that sense we are all the same, because even though we are based and live by the same rules, everything can be interpreted in multiple ways, and that is the beauty of art.

Pablo Picasso, speaking of his world-famous anti-war painting, Guernica, boldly declared: “Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy”.

Emotional photography

© Máxime Ricaurd

But what is artivism?

The simplest definition is to be the combination of the words art and activism. Artivism is the hybridization between the two of them. Art of protest and resistance. Visibility, durability and risk are the spe-

cific features of an intervention that carries a clear socio-political message. This way art becomes a means of communication focused on change and transformation, a language that moves from academic artistic creation to social spaces, until it becomes an educational tool.

All the pictures in this article are examples of artivism work.