The photographer, the taxidermist and the sampler culture
The serie Fotorama, resulting from a photography research conducted by Marcelo Tinoco in the last three years, active reflection on the relationship between the photographic act in culture and fictional creation of the database.
We are faced with a procedure that is born documentary photography, it is archival and culminates with the construction of fictional nature.
There are several technologies involved in the drafting of these images. At the initial stage of work, technical and conceptual issues are related to the photographic act itself. All images are generated by the camera of a documentary photographer with concerns.
How to become an invisible agent, capture the moment in its spontaneity; have a descriptive role and record real events without interference? These issues - specific to photojournalism and to the mythology of the “decisive moment” of Cartier-Bresson - are put in check when Marcelo Tinoco denies the uniqueness narrative that could be contained in one click, and takes the picture as note, as a draft, as a fragment, for a later construction of stories and visual storytelling.
As a rigorous taxidermist, the photographer creates a device for an instant photographic archive, applies the dissection of documentary images into slices, segments, modules and organize them into folders, categories, collections. From the elaboration of an extensive digital database, continues the construction of the scenic pictures of huge proportions.
The images are printed on photography cotton paper in sizes 1to 2 meters, and acquire the effect of authentic Dioramas. The technology involved in this phase of the construction process is, therefore, archiving.
As a craftsman, applied to reconstruct the scenic wildlife of the tropical forests on the Natural History Museum, Marcelo Tinoco produces images in the serie Fotorama. The photographic accuracy, the high definition and a manual calibration of light, create effects of depth and hyper-realism, as a real Diorama.
In the narratives of that photographer-naturalist the predominant strategies remix advocates of a culture sampler. The landscapes, characters, situations - first documented in travel, then dissected and stored in the database - are subjected to an exercise in recycling that results in wandering imagination. In each image, the collage of decisive moments and the approximation of up to now disparate geographies.
Paula Alzugaray