Oct

Imaginative Pictures Play with Your Senses

by Sheron Long on October 4, 2012

Portraits by photographer Giuseppe Mastromatteo showing imaginative pictures that play with your senses

How Fast Did You Say “Oh, I See”?

It took me a minute to see how Giuseppe Mastromatteo’s imagination had played with my senses and caused a double-take in my perceptions. These imaginative pictures are surreal photographs, part of his series “Indepensense.” In the photographer’s words, the series is “about senses and the way we can use them.”

I hope Mastromatteo was talking about the viewer’s senses as well. As I studied these photographs, I was first appreciative of the visual surprise, the feeling I always have when I experience someone else’s creative ideas. “How clever,” I thought, “that our senses could be represented in these illusory ways.”

A Deeper Insight

And then I realized how the photographs seemed to speak a deeper truth to me about people who hide an eye and still see, or those who cover their ears and still hear.

The fact that these faces are without expression leaves the door open wider to the viewer’s interpretation. Is there an open mouth behind the closed lips on the hand? Is the woman speaking words that others do not hear? I listened hard and was pretty sure I heard her voice. What she said was filtered through my own experience and imagination.

I’d like to think the photographer intended that we each use our own senses in creative ways when he combined the words “independence” and “sense” to create the title of this series, which has traveled widely to New York, Miami, Milan, and Paris.

Connecting with the Work of Giuseppe Mastromatteo

These contemporary portraits, shot against clean white backgrounds and completed through digital technology, are now part of the first retrospective of Mastromatteo’s work, entitled “A Liquid Vision” at the Forma Museum of Photography in Milan. This solo exhibition runs from October 2 through November 14, 2012.

Mastromatteo was born in Milan in 1970, studied law, and worked as a creative director in the advertising world.

His view of creativity inspires me as much as his photography. In a recent interview (Eyes in Photography), he said, “Creativity is a constant research of the things that inspire you—new languages, new things in art. Creativity is staying connected with your world.”

Interestingly, it is our senses that best connect us to the world. Once you say “Oh, I see” on your first or second take of Mastromatteo’s imaginative pictures, keep going and see how much more your senses have to say about his work or how connecting with Mastromatteo’s world inspired your creativity.

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