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The photographs were exhibited in Colección Engelman-Ost, Rondeau, Montevideo, in September 2001. They were selected from a series of more than three hundred photographs taken in Laguna Negra, Rocha, Uruguay and Lanín National Park, Neuquén, Argentina.
The photographs were taken with an Olympus OM4Ti camera and a 50mm macro lens, using Kodachrome Professional film.
Exhibition Text
A sequence of four photographs reflecting the intense blue of the sky in a woodland pool. A subtle change in focus presents them as pairs. The photograph becomes surface, then reflection. A trace of Sontag’s memento mori, of Barthes’ image without code and most recently,Burgin’s complex of exchanges between the verbal and the visual comes to the mind. Liz Wells tells us in her "Thinking About Photography: Debates, historically and now," that “two strands of theoretical discussion have featured in recent debates about photography and the role of the image: "first, theoretical approaches premised onthe relationship of the image to reality; second, theoretical approaches which stress the act of interpretation of the image through focusing upon the reading, rather than the taking, of photographic representations.”
I cannot help but look close and smile: Partridge’s response, a visual pun …
in a puddle.
In the words of Norman Bryson, Partridge invites us to “look at the overlooked”,to look at the photographs, at details of sensibility, of surfaces and light, of capturing the writing of light.
The eye stopped on a surface marked by time and nature, snapped out of context by a shutter. Displacement embracing the aesthetics of the object trouvé, focusing on chance, on beauty in the object found, the surface encountered. A moment, captured, displaced, reoriented, made ‘sense’ as a photograph, and only as a photograph.
No emotion, no excess.
Just looking. Intense looking.
A moment in time.
[Details]
Text by Joan van den Berghe - curator.