Enrico Nicolò: Photoblurrygraph

The book Photoblurrygraph presents 51 analogue colour photographs by Enrico Nicolò, progressively more out-of-focus images offering a sensorial, emotional, gradual visual journey going from misty sceneries to vanishing and abstract visions, obtained through an increasing loss of shape of the elements making up natural or scantily inhabited landscapes. This loss of shape is intentionally created “all in-camera”, that is, at the moment of shooting, and almost exclusively on colour reversal film (slides).
This aesthetic, narrative, “scientific” project is meant to help the observer reflect on the subjectivity of the way we see, on what we see, or better, on what we think we see. Such a systematic itinerary towards rarefied and shapeless visions implicitly represents for the author «a pathway to simplification, towards a transfigured essence. It is something that has to do with the purification of the eye, and the existential despoliation men experience throughout their lives. Through a contemplative, visionary – if not spiritual and mystical – journey. Towards light. Towards the Absolute. Where static contemplation is accompanied by dynamic progress».
The classification Enrico Nicolò makes of his iconographic material, divided into five increasingly out-of-focus sections, is both an experimental and a theoretical attempt to put order into a subject (out-of-focus, blur, over-exposure, under-exposure, or simultaneous use of various techniques) which, in the panorama of contemporary photography, has been appearing in the production of various photographers for quite long and in different ways. The model Nicolò proposes is therefore a methodological contribution providing the observer with a general framework, a systematic approach and a key of interpretation.

Annarita Curcio, in her General Introduction writes:
«Let us start with photoblurrygraph then, the word which gives the book its title. Created by Nicolò himself, it is a sort of hendiadys, the result of a successful combination of the words photograph and blurry: something indistinct, vague or hazy. Seeing that the photographic series collected here is the result of a precise intention to disarrange the world of forms in order to present them again as more or less unrecognisable».

And again:
«[…] colour breaks up the shapes of landscapes or architectural features, with the result of a total fusion of objects and space; a space which becomes a luminous chromatic element, in search of total freedom, rejecting common techniques of representation. The photographer’s attention moves from the subject represented to the creative process. The idea that photography is less imitation than creation and that reality is no longer captured through a rational process but through an irrational, emotional one, is thus established».