FROZEN FLOWS

Pep Ventosa’s images are actually stacks of many frames of the same subject, taken from different angles and layered into a composite.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

MOST OF STILL PHOTOGRAPHY IS BASED ON EDITING CHOICES, on the selection of one key instant which stands in for an entire experience. The frozen moment when a runner breaks the tape. The isolated frame of one flap’s worth of an eagle’s descent. Single pieces of seconds that symbolize the complete flow of time. Still images are not really expected to show everything that happens in a scene, from Beginning to End, the way motion picture images are. And yet, there are always groundbreaking visionaries who can create astounding exceptions to that rule. Pep Ventosa is such an artist.

In your first view of Ventosa’s images of carousels, streetcars, or monuments, you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at an impressionistic painting, a kind of lively Picasso-style mashup of viewpoints melded together in a single frame. But his work is completely photographic; it just comes packed with way more information than you encounter in a normal image. Because they aren’t images at all, but layers of images, sometimes hundreds of them, all taken at up to 360 degrees of difference from each other and blended artfully into composites. The actual concept is simple. Pep chooses a common part of an object or scene that he establishes as a center (like the carousel platform at left), and then rotates himself and his camera around that point to shoot multiple “takes” on a single scene, all shot at slightly different angles. Imagine yourself walking all the way around a tree and shooting frames during every part of the circuit. He then calls upon his lifelong experience in both film and digital darkrooms to give all those layers different levels of prominence, sculpting the color and the detail that will be both active and passive in the final composite. What he winds up with could be called a frozen movie, since his resulting photos are a recording of long sequences of activity, different in result from, say, a time exposure, but with the same intent.

Coke Crystal, 2020. My own tabletop adaptation of Pep’s technique.

Just as the cubists tried to create static paintings that included all the different ways of viewing an object married into a single canvas, Pep Ventosa is freeing the photographic process from having to choose one “decisive moment” of a subject to use a static format (the print) to suggest movement in time. And while he really has no equal in the way that he manages this process, he has begun to inspire others to do their own mini-Peps with still life or tabletop images, with far fewer building blocks of, say, a dozen or so exposures assembled in programs like Photoshop that are universally available.

In the image of a Coca-Cola drinking glass seen at left, I shot about 18 frames, merely rotating the glass a bit between shots and keeping the camera on a tripod triggered by a remote. I was careful not to let the central core of the glass move too far left or right, using it as the anchor for the project, allowing the embossed script on the outside of the glass, as well as the shadows created by its vertical ribs, to flow into shapes that simply could never be rendered in a single image. I’m just starting to get a feel for what kind of subject matter will work best with the process, starting small, rather than heading for the local skyscraper, where the rotating process would be reversed, with the building staying constant while I circled around it.

In either small or large cases, what Ventosa has done (and something which is damned hard to achieve in photography’s third century) is to say, in a completely original fashion “oh, you thought you knew what a picture was…..but how about this?” In the making of photos, as in any other visual art, there can be no more important question.