STYLE FACTS: PHOTOGRAPHY: Polaroid visions of Shiraz Grinbaum

Marc T about Shiraz Grinbaum

Susan Sontag said about photography that it is, first of all, a way of seeing and not seeing itself and that it is an ineluctably "modern" way of seeing - prejudiced in favor of projects of discovery and innovation.
Photography is a mental journey, a supreme form of travel, and it is the principal means for enlarging the world, the world around us, our inner world and the visible world. John Berger in Ways of Seeing wrote:
"Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world". .John Berger underlines the interaction of seeing and being seen as an active way of communication between people. Oscar Wilde believes that the painted portrait is in fact the portrait of the artist himself. He wrote in The picture of Dorian Gray in 1891: ' every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. the sitter is merely the accident, the occasion."
The photographs from Shiraz Grinbaum are taking us to that mental journey and interprets the subtle variations of seeing and being seen to a personal style of creating an imagery that is liberating us from any preconceived concepts of what is photography. With her vision she is oscillating with 17th century light, that we know from Vermeer's painting and from the Flemish school, with the use of Polaroids giving to the image a retro , almost a vintage feeling, and brings us back to the 1980s New York, with Maripol's SX70 Polaroid photographs and with her great capacity of creating a contemporary concept of beauty and aesthetics.