What You See Cover

Luciano Rigolini

What you see

Anonymous snapshots are the ideal projection screen: they inspire the imagination to invent stories. The photographer and artist Luciano Rigolini demonstrates, however, that these images, freed from their context, can also convey a visual experience. Rigolini pieces together his findings from flea markets, archives, or the Internet to create a new, independent work - a grammar of seeing and perception. Consciously or unconsciously, we become primarily aware of form and structure in the compiled snapshots, and the specific content of the images becomes inessential. This results in a fascinating aesthetic play that radically questions our habits of seeing. In this cleverly arranged sequence the photographs can no longer be read as simply likenesses of reality. They turn out to be artifacts that construct reality. What You See presents a multiplicity of surprising, confusing, and surreal photographs from a rich fund of anonymous photography.

Anonymous snapshots are the ideal projection screen: they inspire the imagination to invent stories. The photographer and artist Luciano Rigolini demonstrates, however, that these images, freed from their context, can also convey a visual experience. Rigolini pieces together his findings from flea markets, archives, or the Internet to create a new, independent work - a grammar of seeing and perception. Consciously or unconsciously, we become primarily aware of form and structure in the compiled snapshots, and the specific content of the images becomes inessential. This results in a fascinating aesthetic play that radically questions our habits of seeing. In this cleverly arranged sequence the photographs can no longer be read as simply likenesses of reality. They turn out to be artifacts that construct reality. What You See presents a multiplicity of surprising, confusing, and surreal photographs from a rich fund of anonymous photography.

Author(s): Luciano Rigolini

Edited by Fotostiftung Schweiz

With an essay by Peter Pfrunder

Design: Integral Lars Müller

12 x 16 cm, 4 ¾ x 6 ¼ in

160 pages, 107 illustrations

hardback

2008, 978-3-03778-139-5, German
English
French
Japanese
CHF 25.00