A photographic imagination

Photographer Focus: Ron Diorio
from PositiveFocus.org

Each month, Positive Focus highlights a photographer from the Portfolio section of the website. In a featured interview, we ask the artists about their work, their inspirations, their processes for developing their portfolios, and where they want to go next. This month, we are pleased to call your attention to the work of photographer Ron Diorio.

Q. I think you've developed a very clear signature style as a digital photographer, what do you attribute it to?

A. My "style", I would say ridicules the documentary veracity of photography. The images are fictions. They are images of images. In their deconstruction, exaggeration and manipulation the images become objects. This reveals forms and gestures which appear to me truer than the real thing because they are a reflection of the imagined and the dreamt. They are filled with memory. I'd hope over time in this ongoing conversation with the viewer it will not be just one of style but of coherence in the body of work.

The term "digital photography" is a pet peeve of mine. I think "digital" is a ghetto. This is either photography or it is not. I don't want the work to be put into a category over in the corner like some weird little kid at school.

Photography's history is filled with the proficient who fetishize camera formats and f-stops and produced for the most part technically fine, sometimes beautiful, but more often than not mechanical and soulless work. I surprised and disappointed that those who use "digital" as a critical or dismissive characterization of work which they see as created by button pushing - ie. "the computer makes the picture". They are using the same basic criticism leveled against photography by those who say the camera does all the work. It is really disingenuous and at least for me, far from the truth.

Today, we should focus on how the darkroom, both chemical based and software based can empower creative photographers to show their hand at mark making. I predict that photography's first 150 years will be remembered like the first cave paintings - historically important as documents but artistically just very early days.

Where digital is important to me is in distribution. Certainly the Internet and for me sites like Fotolog and Flickr provide an audience which allows me to do things that I might never have a chance to show in a gallery or even make a print of. It empowers you to take chances, do it faster and get immediate satisfaction. This can fill you up with encouragement. It allows me to be prolific without purpose while getting this instant feedback. In some ways this may be better than something bigger that is too far in the future or maybe never comes. For me it has confirmed a sense, a self image, and a persona - this can be a strength, as you try to get attention for your work elsewhere. It has allowed me the opportunity to develop an audience slowly. It is an audience that I share a history with and is involved with the work over time in an intimate manner.

Q. Did you always have a clear vision of what you want to produce?

A. I came to this with all the prejudices that one can have over a lifetime playing with the camera. I love noise - the artifacts of fast film as well as the color cast of the available artificial light. I do not believe I consciously or conceptually set out to any visual end. I had already worked though the new tools available to create audio programs online, I spent 17 years working for a theatrical producing organization and now I wanted to do a storytelling project. I had no idea what that meant except that I had a working title for the project: "A photographic imagination". I wanted to put my marker down at least to the notion that what I was creating was not a document. I wanted the intellectual property not be burdened by the need for model releases - so things needed to be more anonymous. I also knew that at the end of the process, I wanted the object to be produced by photographic means and chose the Digital C-print.

Q. Was there a period of experimentation?

A. Yes, in every image my mistakes are always available to see. I think that each capture device has a learning curve and I have only entry level skills with the software based darkroom tools so every day there is experimentation. But that only deals with the work on a technical level. I am always searching, always experimenting - whether for a style, for what is essential - for a way to express myself in a personal and authentic way.

Q. You shoot a tremendous amount of images on a daily basis. Do you know when you have a great image in the camera?

A. No. I hardly look at the LCD and never through viewfinder when I capture images. I have a sense of what I am trying to capture still I am often surprised by what I have to work with on the screen. Because I have other ends in mind, I don't know or even care except in the most general sense what I have or what elements I might use from any individual image. I am sometimes jealous that I don't share the preciousness of the snap that other photographers seem to get lost in. I capture images by glance but when I am creating the work, when I am constructing the images, it is then that I am seeing. In this "aesthetic of the glance", in the manipulation things become refocused, revealing what I look at everyday without really seeing it at all.

Q. Does the image change so drastically?

A. Every image tends to emerge on its own terms in its own time. I go back over my images again and again - perhaps I learned something new - sometimes what I see changes - maybe I think I may have missed something. As to drastic, to the extent that a polarizing filter can may a bland sky dramatic while shooting in BW or hand toning prints for effect or sitting with toxic chemicals bathing paper in a dark room for hours or hanging studio lights to enhance the contours of a nude model are drastic, then I'd say yes.

Q. What kinds of alterations do you make to the image beyond the stripping of the details? Color bump ups or downs? Compilations of several images?

A. Like all creative people I use the available tools to translate my vision. I do this by transforming the setting, the gestures, the atmosphere as well as anonymizing the people and places. Whatever serves my imagination and the image. The software based darkroom allows me to do all that you mentioned. For me, cropping and resizing for printing are the most frequent and important alterations I make.

Q. Each image seems to come out with a definitive mood. Some of that is driven by the actions of a singular image featured in the photo. Is there something that draws you to that type of image or does is change?

A. I have to think that this is because my two earliest visual influences were the Catholic Church and comic books. I was an altar boy for about seven years starting at age six. This was at St. Anthony of Padua on Houston Street in New York City. I spent many hours around the iconic posed gestural choreography of the statues, the episodic frames of the Stations of the Cross and the stained glass windows which on the south side were sun blocked at some parts of the day by the tenement next door, creating a more ominous, dark, less glorious experience. From the comic books I could disappear into a world of my own - with these superheroes in dramatic poses. In my images, perhaps subconsciously, I am drawn to and lean too heavily of these memories of my youth.

Q. The images always seem to bring out a dreamy atmosphere that you can almost touch before it evaporates. Is there an image out there that you want to capture but it's eluding you?

A. Nearly all of my work to date is based on images captured in public spaces. The characters in the images are mostly strangers. I would like to move inside to more intimate locations. This presents a problem in that I find that if I know someone that is in an image capture I have difficulty applying my imagination to the picture in a three dimensional way. When the person is known to me, the image is just a two dimensional photo. Since I can not just appear in the living room or bedroom of a total stranger I feel that I am missing an articulation of my imagined world. I would like to work with sets with and maybe people wearing masks.

That is what is eluding me.

Q. How is your current work changing from the place you started at with this style?

A. I have come to think this whole process is like sex. It is the intersection of what interests you and what you can get. The rest is up to your imagination. On the craft side I feel more adventuresome. I have added three new cameras in the last few months and that has opened up some of what I can get to and breaks up the routine. I need to be a better editor, create tighter sets. As to how this impacts the style, I try to continue to a simpler more direct approach in each image.

Thank you for the opportunity to be interviewed and to Positive Focus for its support of emerging photo-artists.

As interviewed by Lorrie Palmer

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Mysteries of the Glance.
By Norman Taylor

Ron Diorio's imagery initially evokes qualities of the 'Hopperesque'. These sparsely populated cityscapes, with their angular deployment of architectural detail in compositions like Cornerstone and Hustler club, conjure urban nooks that reference directly the loneliness and faintly sinister atmosphere we have come to associate with Edward Hopper in paintings like Sunday (1926). Furthermore, a heavily voyeuristic quality Diorio has inscribed in images such as Ten thousand days, Lobby at night or Moving day, mobilises a dialectic of compassion and alienation that can be found in Hopper's Office at Night (1940).

But comparison with a major figure of American Art, while no doubt flattering to Diorio, may also come too quickly, curtailing further appreciation of his images. One difference is that, while Hopper's paintings are not exclusively urban in content, the significance of anything approaching rural iconography for Diorio - in Botanica or Cruising for example - actively denies access to a bucolic world beyond the horizon. However ironic such references may be in Hopper, their possibility remains part of the enunciation of his work. Not so for Diorio, who confesses to finding 'green difficult to deal with'.

While there is a contemporary aspect to the costumes of the young men in Cruising, elsewhere Diorio renders historic markers ambiguous. In Widows walk for instance, nineteenth century fashion and architectural references lend a timeless quality, while the figures that punctuate Cruising include a contemporary predatory note. As in Botanica, this implicates the viewer in social questions, which an artist like Hopper tends to eradicate in favour of the psychological. The figure emerging from the dry, leafless trees in Botanica evokes the stroll of a park ambler rather than the purposeful gait of a country dweller: his narrative and identity remain the subject of speculation rather than indicated by his environment.

Despite this socio-urban tone, Diorio's imagery is also evocative of quietly tragic moments, in which hunched figures are reduced to objects by the metropolis that oppresses them. Images like Lament on the death of a Blackberry™, Hustler club or Piccadilly show people suspended in a temporal hiatus, who appear to be either waiting for something to happen or contemplating something that has already befallen them. And we wonder also whether it is more likely that they are doing both, since the syntax of personal narrative saturates their forms, as if they were characters in an ironic film noir.

But if these images evoke oppression, a lighter mood is also present in a variety of Diorio's images. The mock-heroic light that falls in the bathetically titled Lament on the death of a Blackberry™ corresponds to the sheer, childish exuberance of Puddle jump. And if the title of the latter evokes an innocence in the poetry of e e cummings, its falling, starry spangle of city lights owes as much to Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: Falling Rocket (c.1874) as to the darkness of a Scorsese text. Alternatively the contemplation of a strange perspective in Yesterday's empire has the effect of morphing compassionate markers of homelessness and alienation into a sinister figure of a Taliban-like spectre among the ruins of an anonymous ground zero. Or there is the theatrical surrealism of other images - like Learning to fly or Clouds fall for example - which refer more to Dali than Hopper, both of whom would no doubt have done more to lend significance to a facial expression of their lone protagonists.

From the facelessness of Diorio's figures a further opposition emerges: far from obscuring a direct address to the viewer, the lack of a face makes their pose more essential. These postures articulate the complexity of interaction habitually adopted by city-dwellers, in the glance that avoids eye contact on the street. Thus, by presenting for closer scrutiny what is casually taken as sufficient in the glance, Diorio forces realisation of what is also deficient in the 'data- gathering' activity of a glance. And this returns us to the impenetrability of Dreiser's "streets of wall-lined mysteries" referenced in the preface, that translate to the twenty-first century 'Anytown'.

Dreiser introduces Caroline Meeber, the eighteen year old 'Sister Carrie' of his novel, as "possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis", so the quotation that introduces 'Anytown' functions as a manifesto for an urban 'aesthetic of the glance' that is also innocent. The strange mazes of Diorio's 'glances' interrogate Dreiser's "wall-lined mysteries". Light on surface is made to symbolise the "vaguest conception" dwelling in the unconscious of Dreiser's Carrie: the wall of divisive opacity in Outsiders; an easy resistance to human emotion in the walls of Moving day or Ten thousand days; and finally a disturbing, robotic face with glowing eyes that seems to stare from beneath the surface at the left of the frame in Man ray. These are elements of the impressionist glances that comprise Carrie's observation of the city.

The merging of Theodore Dreiser's 1908 text of urban confusion with conditions that pertain in the twenty-first century metropolis lends temporal resonance to these images, extending beyond content. We have been comparing digitally manipulated images with those of painters not simply because computer applications can render a painterly surface or prompt the pursuit of an 'aesthetic of the glance'. As well as surfaces, their compositions have been manipulated, using a computer-aided program to affect addition and deletion of objects. In fact Diorio's application of digital montage techniques resurrects a nineteenth century practice of combination printing, like those of Henry Peach Robinson (1830 - 1901) and Oscar G. Reijlander (1817 - 1875).

New media theorist, Lev Manovich, reminds us that editing or montage was a key twentieth century technique, creating fake realities in mainstream film and provoking conceptual aesthetics in avant-garde treatment of both moving and still images. In the 1980s computers began to extend the possibilities of montage by making it easier to combine disparate visual elements: in the art gallery, 'copy-and-paste' elements, in works by David Salle or Barbara Kruger for example, began to celebrate the resultant hard-edged boundaries of combined objects.

But it turns out that computers do more than simply expand the possibilities of combining elements from different sources: in fact they have led to a new paradigm, one which replaces montage with compositing as the dominant aesthetic. The aim of montage was to create visual, stylistic, semantic and emotional dissonance through active juxtaposition of consciously disparate objects. Compositing, by contrast, blends these elements into a single whole to create a visual gestalt.

What Diorio's work confirms is that a logic of the postmodern aesthetic of the 1980s has finally passed: his technique erases boundaries and rejects the montage aesthetic of juxtaposition in favour of a smoothly continuous appeal to the eye. At the same time the inherent compositing of these images interrogates the conceptual logic of their glanced fictions.

© Norman Taylor
Brooklyn. July, 2005.
Reproduced from visualculture@visualculture.free-online.co.uk

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