“...every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police.” Allan Sekula
My recent production involves the continuous process of re-moulding images, in the attempt to relieve them from their controlled state to unveil the truth. I select the images among those that are normally embedded and contextualized in other signifying systems with their connotations of assumed authority, trustworthiness, neutrality, reliability.
In the series Noise# I work on the assumption that reality and evidence are so ambiguous that they need to be constantly proved, contaminating them through a systematical variation of the amount of noise.
Such a by-product of the image capture-on which photographers have no control and that exists before the photographer intervention in the shaping of an image – is considered as the closest thing to a photographic ‘mark’ and its presence incredibly keeps on restoring the confidence in photography allegation of veracity.
In the present series I dig my way through the connections between the honorific and repressive poles of portrait practice starting from mug-shots published with the same index in Cesare Lombroso book “the Criminal man”, one of the very first attempts, in the 1850s, to use photography to match citizens tendency to commit crimes to their appearance.
Luca Tronci
http://www.lucatronci.com
