Saatchi Gallery: Out of Focus

When I visited the Saatchi gallery the last time, I was not aware it was holding an exhibition entirely about photography, Out of focus. Approaching the gallery, I was not very excited about it: photography has evolved to the point of becoming a powerful weapon often held by inexperienced hands. The amount of time needed to develop a picture grew shorter and shorter, until, with the digital cameras, it disappeared. In the last 30 years photography became a weak substitute to the human eye: what we don't have the time to see, we take a picture of. As a result, photography exhibition are rarely interesting and often banal.

As I walked in the first room, I knew it was not going to be an ordinary photography exhibition. Going through it I figured out it was a celebration of what is left today of photography as an art and a form of expression. Of course there were a few let downs, but overall I was glad I decided to go. I was especially impressed by a few artists.

Every respectable flea market has at least one stall where old, dusty pictures are sold. Yearbook pictures, family picture, colour, black and white, half ripped, half burnt, half faded. Those pictures don't belong to anyone. Nobody knows of them and they are there because they have indeed been forgotten. Or, better, they were really close to being forgotten. All of a sudden that picture of an high school girl, found on the bottom of a dusty box, blown-up beyond its format, sometimes cut in half or shattered, and elegantly displayed, becomes the star of Marlo Pascual's installations.

Another artist that caught my eye is John Stezaker. He too works with existing material, but his pieces are closer to enigmatic picasso-like collages than nostalgic installations. The juxtaposition he creates in his collages creates a broken harmony in the observer's mind: what the eye expects to encounter is broken by the presence of something different.

It was Mariah Robertson though, that showed me something I wanted to see in a photography exhibition: not a photograph. Today art is all about bringing everyday objects to the limits, using media for a different purpose it was meant to, making mistakes, experimenting, and that is something I was missing in photography. Photography was for me always an instant captured in rectangle.

What I liked mostly about the exhibition, is that it opened my mind to revolutionary and original approaches to photography, which gave me a hope for this media that was not so solid before. These artists don't take a picture of things they don't have time to see, they capture shades of life that other people don't.