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Parallax-Scopies in OFF

Posté par Bruno Baltzer à Octobre 15, 2011 19:43

PARALLAX-SCOPIES | Cercle Cité | analogic and digital photographic series | march 2011 choice of 4 out of 29 photographic diptyches

Within the framework of a photographic commission for the renovations of a historic building in the heart of the city of Luxembourg, Bruno Baltzer realizes the photographic series Parallax-scopies.

In memory of the large-scale photographic missions, such as the Heliographic mission, whose uncommon points of view envisage a new perception of the urban reality, Bruno Baltzer reveals in his turn a completely original vision and reflection on photography. On the roof of the most central monument of the city (Cercle Cité) the panoramic gaze of the photographer merges the exploration of different techniques with a reflection on photographic history and creation. The images of the series Parallax-Scopies occur as a series of diptyches. Bruno Baltzer’s regard over-looks the city and offers us, according to the tradition of landscape photography, views or even “over-views” of the town, thanks to an exceptional vision, amplified by a double, almost simultaneous shooting.

The Parallax-Scopies act on the essential concept of the binocular vision and its basic perception. Two cameras, positioned on the same carrying axis, a pinhole and a digital reflex, combine analogic and digital technology, black and white and colour images. This visual complexity blends and discerns its features, every time again, in every image. This work reveals a “plus-de-vue” (Derrida), term which inscribes, in its amphibological construction, the overflowing of a multiple and visionary vision and evokes at the same time the innate blindness of the photographic act. The combination of two devices, the pinhole, which prevents the precise control of framing but also of its impression and the digital reflex, which instantly reveals its subject, gives life to a heuristic of the visible. The unlimited depth of field of the pinhole accentuates the feeling of visual continuity while the digitally reconstructed zones of the images suggest a perceptive discontinuity. The parallel between these optical shifts creates a modular and a hypnotic vision of reality, without the occurring of a real fracture. The mind spontaneously reconstructs our vision between chemical and mathematical processes, monochrome colours and dense blacks and whites. This visual decoupling invites us to a glance insistence. Nothing repeats as before. Details slip as they intensely fix by a sort of retinal persistence. Between impression and recognition, known and already known, the new and the past are clearly entangled.

Descendant of stereoscopic photography, whose purpose was the attainment of a three-dimensional vision through the combination of two similar images, in Bruno Baltzer’s photos the stereopsis is affected by a kind of squint (defect of the parallelism of visual axes), not because of a visual anomaly but because of a visual reinforcement deriving from the simultaneous use of two dichotomous systems of image creation. Within this panoramic apprehension through “bird’s-eye view” perspectives, the world’s insight is fully human. The architectural principle of Bruno Baltzer’s photography, between construction and reconstruction, belonging to the actual research in contemporary photography, questions the idea of stable representation.

Nathalie Dibern