Dissolving: The wonder

In a photo by the Portuguese Andre Boto, a man in a suit stretches out a mountain landscape photographed in bright colors and minute details on a sheet in front of a depressingly polluted industrial area, so that the viewer does not have to face reality. In the Czech Marko Jindřich’s picture from 1945, the amateur photographer stretches out a similarly idyllic landscape sheet in front of the ruins of destroyed Warsaw, so that the survivors can capture themselves in front of a usual, more optimistic photographer’s background.

Boto’s picture was chosen this October as the “photo of the year” out of 48,000 pictures submitted to the Creative Photo Awards of Siena. The finalist photos of the competition were exhibited in October and November in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico.

The theme of this year’s competition is “I wonder if you can”, from which most of the pictures chose wonder as the keyword. The only exception is the Bulgarian Yuri Vasilyev’s Fish, you can!, which plays with the two meanings of ʻcan’.

But what is wonder? In most of the pictures in Palazzo Pubblico, it is the replacement of the usual reality with another, brighter reality, exactly as is depicted in the winning photo. Still lifes constructed and bodies dressed as Netherlandish paintings, visually elaborated concepts, landscapes with the obligatory lonely tree filtered to the extremities, a musician as a modern Orpheus moving the world as in a Surrealist paiting. The wonder that we await, which is fundamentally diffrent from reality, and which never comes.

In only a few pictures does the true meaning of wonder appear: the epiphany. The wonder that is always present and sometimes shines on. The entry of authenticity into reality, or rather the cathartic recognition of its presence in reality.

Roddy Macinnes: Honeymoon in Finland