Critique Welcomed Something that is taking me busy

[Gianluca Drago]

I'm not a real photographer, nor an artist or an architect, I'm not an art historian, but in the last few months I've been wandering around the streets and squares and places of my city trying to document all still-existent rare emergencies of an authorial art (mainly paintings and sculptures) dated around the heart of the past twentieth century.
My job is a dirty one: no high end gear, no lights, no nothing, just a compact camera that I carry with me all the day long, taking photos before work hours and after work hours. I made up a site for those photos. Still a work in progress, but not so bad looking. It's a local thing, you know, something that's maybe interesting for the people that live in Padua, Italy, and only for a minority of them.

The photos that don't get into site (for various reasons, you don't have to ask) are quarantined in the folder "discarded". But not after the punishment of being converted to black and white. "Do you want to enter the site? Repent! Otherwise you'll be B&Whited in this limbo folder until I decide to promote you to RGB" (I can be implacable when I need to be, like the Spanish Inquisition).

For your amusement, here's a show of some of those unpresentable quarantined photos.

 

[Pete Askew]

Well if that is how I am going to be treated I wouldn't mind be quarantined! What a wonderful selection of images. The tones on the first two are gorgeous and I love the pigeon spikes on the third. They somehow seem to fit the subject.

I find the plaques above the doors interesting too and I posted a series with a related motif here a few years ago (I'll try and find them). In fact, even without the plaques' I like the the image and the other more architectural ones too. The image of the statues is also very effective and it took me a while to spot the bird, and now that I have, I cannot imagine the image without it.

 

[Gianluca Drago]

Well if that is how I am going to be treated I wouldn't mind be quarantined! What a wonderful selection of images. The tones on the first two are gorgeous and I love the pigeon spikes on the third. They somehow seem to fit the subject.

I find the plaques above the doors interesting too and I posted a series with a related motif here a few years ago (I'll try and find them). In fact, even without the plaques' I like the the image and the other more architectural ones too. The image of the statues is also very effective and it took me a while to spot the bird, and now that I have, I cannot imagine the image without it.

Too generous! I really appreciate your heart-warming words. Thank you.

 

[Pete Askew]

I did create a series from all of the doors, but it looks like I only posted a few here.

Gutenbergstr, Potsdam

At last I have complete a small project I wanted to do. At the lower end of Gutenbergstr is a set of apartment buildings from the GDP period. Above the door of each is a different sculpture, quite stylised and very playful. There are 10 in all and here are a couple of examples. The rest are...

realphotographersforum.com

 

[Gianluca Drago]

Well if that is how I am going to be treated I wouldn't mind be quarantined! What a wonderful selection of images. The tones on the first two are gorgeous and I love the pigeon spikes on the third. They somehow seem to fit the subject.

I find the plaques above the doors interesting too and I posted a series with a related motif here a few years ago (I'll try and find them). In fact, even without the plaques' I like the the image and the other more architectural ones too. The image of the statues is also very effective and it took me a while to spot the bird, and now that I have, I cannot imagine the image without it.

The photo with the bird didn't get into my site because it's an installation too recent (2008). It is named "The Garden of the Justs of the World", a creation by the artist Elio Armano. When I recently had the occasion to meet him he explained it as the storm that devastated the 20th century. When I went there, an occasional egret entered the shot unexpectedly like an iconic sign of peace. Let's hope this new century won't require monuments to remind us of past tragedies.

 

[Gianluca Drago]

I did create a series from all of the doors, but it looks like I only posted a few here.

Gutenbergstr, Potsdam

At last I have complete a small project I wanted to do. At the lower end of Gutenbergstr is a set of apartment buildings from the GDP period. Above the door of each is a different sculpture, quite stylised and very playful. There are 10 in all and here are a couple of examples. The rest are...

realphotographersforum.com

Quite exceptional indeed! Thank for sharing. Tomorrow I'll be out of town for a week, but nevertheless I'll take my time to go through the site you linked.

 

[Stephane Tougard]

Hi

Very good demonstration that photograph is not an art, but it's a technical mean to document and witness reality. You're more a "real photographer" than many because your work has a purpose of inventory and documentation of the things that surrounds us and you're not lost in the wrong purpose of "creativity" as if a camera would create anything (it merely takes a picture of a moment, the photographer is only the technicien who witnesses and freezes this moment).

Technically, as a technicien of the pictures, as long as framing is correct, focus and exposure are good and the information you want to save is in the photograph, it's all good to go. We can add contrast, zone of lights, saturation or desaturation, filters ... that's mostly BS, what counts is the moment saved, the object witnessed, the history recorded.

Mission accomplished. Congratulations.

 

[Len Philpot]

To my eye the third image has a tonal quality that's a bit beyond the others. Maybe it's a result of the tone in context of the uniform geometric shapes. But it's graphically strong and arresting.

 

[Gianluca Drago]

Very good demonstration that photograph is not an art

@Stephane Tougard Well, in my case you surely aren't wrong but I wouldn't generalise. Thank you for your comment!

 

[Ivar Dahl-Larsen]

I would like to see them in colour. Why, because in my world comparisons are of utmost importance and how can I compare without the other?

 

[Gianluca Drago]

I would like to see them in colour. Why, because in my world comparisons are of utmost importance and how can I compare without the other?

As you said, Ivar, B&W is more forgiving. And that is the reason for these photos to be without colour.
It' a lot of photos I posted here, and if I had to re-post them in color I'm not sure that Pete would be so forgiving...

 

[Ivar Dahl-Larsen]

You could be right regarding Pete, so let us keep this from him, right?