Have you ever seen Zurich in the summer?

A mix of colors floating on the river, terraces, music, people, but nothing as beautiful as the dusk light. It was as if I was gazing at a painting, but at the same time I was part of the painting. The light was decomposing in all the shades of red and orange that could ever exist. I even tried to imagine how my camera would try to reduce all these shades to the common RGB and then try to reproduce everything exactly as I saw it. It's strange that when I close my eyes I can go back to that place, at that certain hour, hear the people passing by, feel the smell of the water. The way we remember is so different from how the machines store information. We don't have (yet) photographs that can bring back the smell or the whole atmosphere of the place. You can tell the time of day, by the lights, but the rest is only in my head and no matter how hard I try the photo is just not enough to express it.

American History X

I've seen the movie before, I even remembered most of the action, I even remembered it when we were discussing the "white supremacy" in the Media Theory class, but what I did not remember is the way images work together in creating a story. The extreme close-ups in slow motion seem to express more that any lines could. Although the story is very powerful, this time, I tried to focus more on the details, the camera angles, the point of view and all the things that really made this movie powerful. The extreme close-ups on the eyes let you see inside the soul of the character, let you decipher if he is "good" or "bad" deep down. It doesn't matter that his head is shaved or that he has a swastika tattooed on his chest, because when you see his eyes you realize that his not a villain.

Since the movie goes back and forth in time, it's very easy for the viewer to distinguish between those two realms: the past (the memory) is always in black and white, while the present is always in color.

You don't sense the music throughout the story, sometimes you don't even realize it's there. That is until you know what's going to happen next, just because of the music. It's this imperceptible presence - like the warmth of a summer wind that bring about salty air from the ocean. Most of the times, you don't even feel it, you don't know that the air you're breathing is salty, until it changes, until it disappears.

There are very few wide shots. It's like it doesn't even matter what's around the characters. Even when you have wide shots, the character stands out, like a pillar, dragging your attention towards him, not letting you focus on anything else, not even for a minute. The camera always tells you where to look and most importantly what to see. Nothing is left to chance.

In the end, when Danny died, I almost started crying. I had seen the movie before, I knew he died in the end, so why did I feel this way? Then I remembered the difference between E.T. and Citizen Kane. We did talk about it a lot and I even started analyzing all the movies I see according to the shots that are used. I guess the close shots that gave me the chance of a glimpse behind the cold shell of the character, broke me down.

Even more, just towards the end, Danny becomes the narrator. And he continues narrating while lying dead on the bathroom floor, as if he were still alive. It's strange, how the camera and the storytelling can make you believe what your heart wants you to believe. I found myself wishing that he was not dead (therefore he is still the storyteller) and that the next scene would be with him lying on a hospital bed...badly injured, but still alive. I knew that was not the case, I knew the movie did not end like that, but I still hoped...as if somebody could feel my prayers and change the ending. I had become so close to the character, because of the closeness between him and the camera. I was never part of that story, but being so close, made me feel like there was no distance between my world and that world. I was no longer the outsider, I was there in the midst of things, seeing, living, feeling everything they felt, I was in each one of the characters, finding myself there and living the story along with them, every step of the way.

A Day at the MET

You'd think it's just a museum...Ok, so it's called The Metropolitan Museum of Art, so the building looks really big and impressive, but when you go inside, you feel as if you've entered a labyrinth of history where you can just cruise through time. I didn't get a change to see all the collections as the museum is not open 24 hours, but I got to see the Egyptian Art & Medieval History, the Arms and Armors collection and The Age of Rembrandt.

I saw a mummy for the first time and what I found amazing was that it was so easy to not think about the person that was in there when you had no representation of that person. But some o them had their face painted over the wrappings and suddenly it was not so easy to view the mummy as a piece of history; I realized that somehow I was in a graveyard where the bodies were not buried, but displayed for everybody to see.

The arms and armors seemed huge, especially the ones that were used in the 15th or 16th century. Horses and men dresses in steel with huge guns or swords. It seemed that they were able to carry more than their bodyweight and still fight. And the armor seemed so stiff and tight - I guess they didn't suffer from claustrophobia :).

The Age of Rembrandt was the part I liked most. Maybe because I love Rembrandt or maybe because it was so incredible. There were paintings by Rembrandt, but also by his apprentices and by other painters that were inspired by him. It's impossible not to love his portraits and self portraits. I had the feeling that some of them were not even painted, but that he somehow photographed the persons and than he painted over the photographs. Details, that you could barely acknowledge were spread across huge canvas, were drawing you closer to the subject as you could ever be. I remembered something I read for the Media Theory class about the "aura" that art has and how that "aura" is disappearing more and more in new art. The "aura" was still there in Rembrandt's paintings and it took over your feelings the moment you started looking at the canvas. You were transported in a new dimension, a dimension of color, shades, darkness and light where all the characters are still but talk to you in different languages, where the lines all converge in your life-line, and where the "aura" still exists.

perfection resides in the little things

Sometimes, you only realize perfection when you look at the details. I saw the cars at Americana Manhasset, they were all beautiful, no doubt about it, but their perfection resided more in the incredible details. That is what makes the difference between just a car and THE car.
Because detailz matter!

Vanderbilt Cup

Just imagine a place where you can see the newest Corvette, but at the same time Rolls Royces from the 1930s, the legendary Duesenberg, a car that looks like a carriage and a lot o people. People that have one thing in common. They just love cars. Old, new, it doesn't matter. What impressed me the most was being so close to such old cars. Some of them are not even made today, some of them are the only survivors of their species. It's interesting to see what car design meant back then and what it means now. Back then the racing cars had the form of a bullet, narrow and long, while nowadays they are wide and very very low. So low that if you would try to fit a tennis ball between the car and the ground, you couldn't.

But let's get back to the design of the cars and let's see how the perception of art changed in the last centuries.

Let's just consider these 2 cars. It may only be my imagination, but I feel that the design of the old cars is supposed to resemble the human face. Ok, we don't have popping eyes, but still the headlights are the eyes, the grid is the nose and the mudguards are the cheeks, you just have to be a bit more imaginative to see that. The old cars are curvy and big, some of them are quite huge, measuring up to 18 feet, although they only have 2 seats.

And here come the new cars:

slick and small, taking advantage of all the aerodynamics principles. They are no longer big and curvy, but lean and small.

Could this have anything to do with the way the human figure has evolved. Back in the 30s or 40s, big, Rubensian figures where considered beautiful, so the designers took the Rubensian beauty into the shape of the cars. But know all that has changes. We look up to skinny models, tall and lean. And maybe the new design of the car is made accordingly to our idea of beauty. Nowadays, for many people Rubens is just a painter who painted fat women, certainly not an inspiration to us. Today we get inspired by the skinny girl in the jeans campaign.

there's art everywhere

In NYC you can find art everywhere you turn you head. Even if it's on a huge trash can at the subway. I don't remember what station it was, but I know it's somewhere in the East Village. Why I like this? Because it's so New York. You take a sheet of paper and some markers and all of the sudden you have a poster that can be hung in a subway station. It doesn't take that much to be an artist, if you really want to be one. In case you see Shells or Scott, tell them I said Hello.

Fashion Week

A few days ago I had the opportunity to go to a fashion show during the NY Fashion Week. Needless to say that the place was crowded with a zillion of photographers, camera men, but also extremely beautiful women. The type of women that any regular person envies, not because they all looked so gorgeous, but because models always have an aura around them when they are on the runway. Of course, it's all in the lighting technique. While the public remains in the shadow, the spotlights shine upon them making everything even more spectacular. The models always entered the runway on the left side and exited on the right side, gracefully gliding in the sea of light as if nothing around them mattered, not the people, not the flashes, not even the huge lens on the photographer's cameras.

Bodies

New York is in itself an exhibition because anywhere you go, there are people trying to express art in ways maybe you didn't even imagine. Whether it's graffiti on the warehouses or a painting gallery, or maybe just a child that buids sandcastles in Coney Island. When I came to New York, I realized that this is the kind of city where it's worth to have a camera always with you. There is always something to photograph and with the right angle and the right light, you could shoot a piece of art in the heart of the Art City.

First exhibition I saw in New York was Bodies. There was no frame to analyze there, no foreground or background. Just people that were once alive, real people that stood there for us to gaze at the amazement that is the human body. But now, these people didn't have any names, they were just human specimens, no first names or last names, just that. Impressive as it was to see inside a human body, it felt also a bit scary to see how frail we are. An amazing machinery able to adapt to almost anything, but at the same time subject to being destroyed in a second.