Foto Suelta / Loose Photo

To Release Lía Colombino 1 To Release the Aim The person holding the camera goes on a photographic expedition, sometimes with a specific aim.

To Release

Lía Colombino

1 To Release the Aim

The person holding the camera goes on a photographic expedition, sometimes with a specific aim. If the person we are talking about is a professional photographer, this is more than certain.

If the aforementioned professional relies on photography for daily sustenance, that becomes categoric. Such and such photographs must be taken, trimming reality in such and such frames. The photographer wants to say this or the other according to an aim chosen a priori. The camera registers those images it trims from reality, enclosed in a line of work which taken in bulk and as a whole will want to “say something”.

In this route, however, there are scenes, moments ―the opening of a new dimension in the eye perhaps―, when the route is interrupted to give way to what goes beyond the script. Thereupon the aim is released, remains without continuity, until professional calling resumes that moment of digression and returns the camera its aim.

2 To Release (Oneself)

That fleeting dimension that opens and closes for a moment, and that beckons that other thing in the script, that which is found in its margins, away from the line or the contour, assembles some other plot.

Plots are woven in different ways; an essay generally weaves a plot whose texture may be understood, may be decoded. When the weave has no plan, texture goes mad, does not repeat its patterns, releases itself towards a certain anarchy of what is to come.

To release (oneself) would function like and on/off switch. A type of mode in which the photographer places himself, a mode which ―in the midst of that planned route―, halts the work imposed by subsistence to allow in that other time into the image he will capture. The time of the working photographer is suspended, open to contingency for an instant in which desire reigns and the gaze is its executant.

Becoming a loose photographer is handling that switch in a masterly manner.

3 Loose Photo

Products are bought or sold, packaged or in bulk. These images, the ones Fernando Allen trims from reality, are not included in any a priori pattern. The dimension of the eye that recognizes something disregarding any plan, could be a loose photograph, transacted in bulk. The loose photo would then be an image captured both by the eye's machinery and the lens that does not adhere to the script, that remains away from it, and that, in turn, is freed from its packaging.

But the eye, the lens, in connivance, resolve their documentation seizing that which is loose, without plan, admitting it into a gallery of the unclassifiable. That which has no place in the archive. Bestowing order to things would be the archive's gift. An address for the document; to bestow this is to bestow categories. Loose photo would be a category whose assumptions are quite doubtful: which attributes should an image have to enter into it?

Could we speak, perhaps, of images pertaining to that which is loose? Or, maybe, of loose images? Or is the photographer the one who runs loose and projects that category onto his products?

What is certain is that these loose photographs, released from specific a priori aims; released, also, from being part of professional work, could be read, in turn, in the loosest way possible.

Each reader, released from any aim, shall assemble the line he pleases through the pages of this book that condenses that which was not made to have a container. That image which, by virtue of being outside the script assembles a residual outlook: images expelled from concrete aims and disseminated so as to be organized, only momentarily, and given a contingent meaning by the reader's recycling eye. Whichever that might be.