Photography 1: The Documentary

Celf Gallery #1

Renewing structures and ways of looking at ourselves from CELF. Galería Celf is a space that was born from Rewarding Artists, there was released the best Posts of the week curated by Celf according to our team, giving a small reward to the Artists. The central idea has not changed, Galería Celf aims to highlight the best Posts of the artistic community at Steem and bring them together in a way that builds a dialogue between different articles and get a real exposure of their talent. We hope with this first broadcast to achieve a new way of seeing the curatorship in Steem that becomes a meeting place that encourages more content creators to share their art in Celf and Steem.

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Photography from its very beginning is considered the art of Registering, documenting history, freezing a moment and, finally, leaving evidence that something happened and the pass of time. But now, documenting is becoming easier and easier, a selfie is definitely a photographic record, as well as the photographs of an event or cultural manifestation, but what is the difference between a documentary record and an event? Today we present three authors who present three visions of documentary photography.

@arrozymangophoto tells us a little about the background of documentary photography:

"It appears in the 20th century as a need to portray facts, people in their daily activities, and little by little a solid model is being built that ended up in two major fields such as social documentation for archive and documentary report. The first is intended to save images for later study and understanding, here you can see changes or disappearance of something or someone, and the second is made and immediately focuses on the current subject.

Photograp and struggle - understanding documentary photography

by @arrozymangophoto

It is important to mention that the documentary is the photographer's immediate choice, but it also represents the photographer's concerns to the fullest. @arrozymangophoto calls it "photograph and struggle" because it represents the exercise and at the same time the commitment to its people and its culture, thus making them the main themes of the photographic work of @arrozymangophoto.

It's a fight against time and what the globalized society has been destroying, that's why and much more I photograph and fight. To keep my cultural traditions alive @arrozymangophoto .

Our first author mentions two types of documentary record, social and reportage. This time we try to group two Posts that were a perfect example of how to handle documentary photography within its wide range of experimentation.

How do I take pictures on the street with a phone?

by @segapema

The first time I saw Sergio's work I was deeply impressed, it was in fact a source of inspiration for this type of photography. While @arrozymangophoto seeks to capture the people of his community, Sergio faces the jungle of the Caracas Metro, an extreme place to take photographs, but how well he mentions in his Posts: it is about doing what moves you and drives you to create

Given the security circumstances in my country, I am obliged not to take out the camera and to be cautious in doing so... but it turns out that I don't always want to leave my camera stored and I don't always want to let pass those situations that I observe in the street. So I decided to start taking pictures with the phone, regardless of the final image quality, regardless of the impossibility of manually handling the camera values. The important thing for me is to rescue those moments that I observe in seconds.

We see in Sergio's work that concern of which I spoke, once you become obsessed with the magic of the moment you look for all possible ways to capture it. Those concerns come from everyday life, documentary works usually frame a specific place, but always seen from the originality of each author (and their willingness to experiment), because otherwise we have simple registration photos of any place. Once we study the space until we know enough to take the photo according to a speech or purpose, there we are making documentary.

@Michelleozza in his series of Post about Caracas, in the search for Pantone colors around the city, gets a beautiful documentary work. More similar to a documentary report since it is a central search around the object of study, in this case Caracas. On this occasion Michelle goes hunting for white structures in the city of Caracas.

Caracas Pantone (II) (Special Edition)

by @michelleozza

My twenty-two years I have lived here and walking the streets of the city can become a balsamic exercise.

A clear relationship with the environment will always make our documentary photographs honest and sensitive pieces. Michelle achieves here a beautiful balance between the White as an active Code (which has meaning) of her photographs playing with the imaginary that everyone has of Caracas or the site she photographs.

Michelle's photography is not entirely linked to a social or cultural search but rather to an aesthetic one, but the way in which she collects and presents her work definitively separates it from the Street Photography achieving that authorial vision so necessary in the documentary.

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This demonstrates the flexibility and possibilities of documentary photography. It is not only street photography (any street), but it is also the means by which we can interpret our reality and our everyday life. It is really how we see the life that touches us. Documentary photography stops the world around us so that we, the photographers, leave our mark. And our three authors are the perfect manifestation of this discovery of art.