Content awareness

"These images express my surprise in discovering that Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother was the result of other, prior images. I should have known better perhaps, but icons, like sensible magicians, are better served when not revealing their secrets."

These few lines, taken from the statement for his series Content Aware Fill, already set the tone for the many projects by Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, an artist who would be legitimate to describe as part of the group of the 'photographic pihilosophers'. His images never stop raising the issue of how our own imagery is shaped, how we can find ourselves not having really chosen the way we look at things, and ultimately how photography can be a form of reappropriation of our gaze, to reset our visions and start again from scratch to look around us.

Here is what he writes about his image Digital Color Checker: "This single image is a re-photographic project prompted by Stephen Shore's 'Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975'."

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975


"I visited the intersection in Los Angeles in January 2011 and used a digital color checker to interrupt and signify my re-presentation of the site as a digitally marked space.

My own investigations into the photograph and with the site come from an interest in the material and methodological relationships between the continuous richness of the analogue color that Shore was able to achieve and the limited and compartmentalized color that the form of the digital color checker seems to suggest."

All right, you have my attention now.

(found via Landscape Stories)


Images 1, 3 and 4 © Sherwin Rivera Tibayan