Free Photo Review: Photo review - Gig photos V

This is the funniest gig photo for me. There’s something charmingly dumb about it, something surreal, and a teeny bit retro if you like. Well not like TV commercials or phone companies with their professional, elegant trendy styles, but rather, a good deal of house of culture with its old, dusty curtains, plastic wainscot, buffet bar and ikebana. (If you remember that.)

Because a photos compresses information in lucky cases. It brings things together in a way we expect them to come together, we can plan the effect beforehand, and still the arrangement, the lights, shadows, colors, motions and the environment can come together as something quite different from what we were planning. Think about it: if you should make drawings about concerts just like trials in the US, we’d have completely different means for compressing, recording coarsely, composing, etc. A photo doesn't lie, seemingly. Still, quite often there’s an angle, a sight, which is funny, awkward or silly. In a drawing, this is defined beforehand. It’s going to be a documentary drawing, a caricature, a study, or a sketch for a painting or a photo. In the latter case, the pieces of a sequence, their connectivity is more important than the quality of the drawings. The quality of drawing is not very important, what matters is what comes after what, just like in a screenplay.

The picture above displays everything that makes a gig photo funny, grotesque but at least hilarious. Imagine, it would be so interesting to show this photo to somebody coming from a distant and foreign culture and ask them to tell us what is in the picture, what they are doing. He might talk about big hairy gods or demons who are most probably dancing a ritual dance in a tent. One of them is in trance, he is probably in close connection with spirits, while the other one is pulling strings on a stick in order to tranquilize the angry demons, and the women have already taken out the pots in the background for cooking in the evening.

I wonder why I did not mention the name of Anton Bragaglia and Mario Marinetti when I was writing about the causes of blur. I had the opportunity when writing about motion blur in one of the photos. And it meant to represent an arbitrary motion blur with all its beauty, blur, pushing the limits to the edge of recognition. And here's something extra with a picture where there’s a man playing the cello, just like in the black-and-white photography with motion blur in the 1910’s made by Bragaglia. He can be called the father of the previously-mentioned pictures, as he made his works inspired by Mario Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto: these were the photographic representation of the stir and dynamism and new artistic fields of the modern world. Futurists were inspired by the mechanism of machines, artificial lights, radio signs, and they wanted to find a new way of expression in pictures or poems.

Today’s cello picture is a perfect copy of the former study series. The means – when well-used - provides endless opportunities for representing emotions. The man practically stuck to the stage is unrecognizable from the head, which makes the whole picture grotesque.

If somebody decides to take similar photos, the smallest motion blur can indicate the smallest differences and changes of emotions, gestures, which we can clearly sense compared to the sharp body parts.

The abstract effect of full motion blur, full bluntness and the dynamism can be nicely counter-balanced by a series which goes from easily understandable to the unseen, non-understandable, what can just be sensed. Such a series can be made anywhere, we have a plentiful of topics, you see or if you are brave enough, you can imagine.

Text: Balázs Turay
Photos: Szilvia Bátky-Valentin