Elisa Barbosa Riva SCU

Liquid Photography is, more than a concept or aesthetic mode, a new way of organizing reality in correspondence with the paradigm shift described by Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity. The Polish thinker clearly outlines a broad territory where “fluid modernity (…) has radically changed the human condition and demands a rethinking of the old concepts that once framed its narrative discourse.” Liquid Photography is a logical consequence of this new ordering of the world. The present slips through our fingers like water. Documentary cinema attempts to seize time as a fractal object reconstructed by consciousness.

At this point, we diverge from trends that assume photographic fluidity to be merely a mode of representation. We consider the documentary experience as an alternative reality that does not seek to explain (much less reflect) what is often referred to as real-reality. Liquid Photography is built from images that capture the fluidity of the moment. We seek to manipulate time and turn it into a visual archetype. We will only be able to observe reality if we can detach ourselves from the wall of meanings that obstructs our vision.

Could the suspicious gaze of the outsider be the most consistent reflection of our consciousness? Is it only possible to access the unknown through an estrangement of the gaze? How can we see with our blind eyes? Must we strip the eye bare, subject it to visual training, demagnetize the gaze?

Liquid Photography embraces a non-retinal conception of cinematic art. When light enters the viewer’s eye, it passes through the cornea, the pupil, and the lens, reaching the retina, where the electromagnetic energy of light is converted into nerve impulses that travel via the optic nerve to the brain for processing by the visual cortex. The retina is a medium, not an end. We distance ourselves from any aesthetic philosophy aimed at pleasing the individual’s retina. Truth and beauty must be produced in the viewer’s brain. The absolute is realized and expressed in the particular, but what happens in each moment is a constantly renewed miracle in the wondrous game of free surrender.

How can we achieve that freedom so desired and so feared? How can we possess without domesticating? How can we portray the instant without freezing it? In what way can we express the deep structure of the fluid?

In this workshop, we develop a series of questions that challenge the conventional ways of understanding the poetics of documentary time. Liquid Photography, instead of offering a tyrannical conceptual framework, fosters and encourages a new attitude toward cinematic language—a new way of seeing, stripped of preconceived ideas.