For PAIR Project. Microphisics of affection Rodrigo Alonso, Art curator. Two adults walk along in an unknown place. The sun projects their shadows in front of them telling us that it is around midday. The casual walkers, a man and a woman, are wearing shorts and shirts over short-sleeved T-shirts, sandals and identical white caps. With their backs straight and arms hanging by their sides, they walk on very white legs making exactly the same movement: one straight, moving forward, supporting the weight of the body, while the other leaves the ground slowly to take a new step. The eyes looking straight ahead, lost, compensate for the empty space in front, highlighting the singularity of their synchronized walk. This photograph is part of a set that Daniel Romano has taken over the last few years, and that today make up a collection in the book Par (Pair). As in the famous piece by Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967, the name of the book draws attention to similarities, leaving differences aside. It invites us to notice similar details, simultaneous actions, and momentary concurrent positions of a group of people who go through life without being conscious of their mutual synchronicity. It highlights some kind of alignment of the universe, no less meaningful because of its instant nature. He takes from the complex, chaotic and vast world we inhabit a collection of isolated situations that lead us to see reality from a singular point of view. The series of photos is in fact the product of an observation exercise. Beyond the spontaneity of the acts and postures he captures, it is clear that they are repetitive from certain positions, angles and framings. Here, the view of the photographer builds a scene guided by the personal interest of finding regularity in the scheme of things; a task that reminds us of the tireless attempt by Jorge Luis Borgesâ characters to discover the code of existence. The purpose of Romano is, perhaps, more modest, but no less persistent. It is not just about finding coincidences or showing people at inconsequential moments when they make the same movement, but above all, about pointing out a bond, real or possible. In his vision, people share gestures, postures, attitudes and habits. From the complicated world that we live in, the artist picks out people in communion, who, consciously or unconsciously, interact closely in the simplicity of daily activities in social and communal rituals; when they walk, rest, play sport or work. Otherwise, calling them pairs wouldnÂŽt be justified. In every case, it is about a real search. Although the images look spontaneous, actually, they are often the result of long waits and surreptitious pursuits. Sometimes, the artist follows possible subjects for a period of time until he finds the pose that unites them or that demonstrates a whole process which reveals the effectiveness of the bond. Other times, fleeting moments are captured in the shots. No matter what the situation, his presence is crucial. In some photos, a look or a glance gives him away, but most of the time the use of a telephoto lens prevents exposure, hiding the presence of the photographer and his technical device. The shots are selected where the focus is on visual similarities. That is why, even though all the images were obtained with a direct shot and without any subsequent manipulation, the authorâs vision lying behind each one of the captured images cannot be mistaken. The photographs that are part of Pair were taken in different places around the world; clothing, landscapes, streets, buildings and other features evidence these multiple scenarios. There, the artist is necessarily a stranger, a tourist. We could say that the series has, at some point, a foreignerâs view that observes with inquisitive eyes. Before a strange reality, gestures, poses and habits are subject to analysis and investigation and everyday life becomes a field of rarities and discoveries. However, today the foreignerâs, or touristâs, view is co-opted by the leisure and entertainment industries. There is nothing spontaneous about the endlessly repetitive photographs of the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower that visitors to New York or Paris take and treasure as if they were theirs. World capitals have ceased to be strange places that spark off curiosity. On the contrary, they are very well-known places which only require superficial photographic verification to register a visit, almost always fleeting, to spaces that are so common they can be said to have lost their very meaning. From this perspective, we cannot say that Daniel Romanoâs images share something with the view of the contemporary tourist. We could think that his work is similar to the activities of those travelling artists who portrayed unknown lands, going with sailors and explorers on their journeys. However, this is not the case either, because, unlike the foreigner that arrives at a certain place without knowing what he will find, Romano arrives at each of his destinations with a precise goal: finding regularities that evidence subtle ways of body language that could be traced beyond the peculiarities of those specific places. His work transcends geographic idiosyncrasies to go deep into some kind of study of global communities, or more precisely, an examination of the components which we could depict as anthropologic. Not so long ago, anthropology dealt almost exclusively with remote, strange and non- western societies. The specification to assure the objectivity of an investigation, and with it the scientific validity of an anthropologistâs work, lay in the fact that this person did not belong to the community under study and did not share their customs, life experiences or values. Being a distant observer was an essential requirement for the exploration of this other culture, which could only be an object of study if it was isolated from its examiner. However, in recent years, some authors have presented a basis for the anthropology of what is close to us. In his book Los no lugares. Espacios del anonimato. Una antropologĂa de la sobremodernidad 1 (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity), Marc AugĂ© reflects on the subject and supports the possibility of having a distant and analytical vision over the society in which the investigator is immersed. To achieve this, he says, it is not necessary to change the foundations of the discipline, but to rethink how the category of the other culture is built, as âthe question of the other is not a subject that anthropology finds once in a while; it is its main intellectual object, the foundations on which the different areas of investigation must be defined.â 2 One of the main problems with this perspective is the impossibility of observing society as a whole. Necessarily, the investigation must begin with small groups, or even individuals, but for AugĂ© this does not constitute a real difficulty, as the features that characterize the group can be found in each member of the community. In any case, it is about having a better understanding of the relationships between individuals and society: âAnthropology is interested in the representation of the individual, not only because it is a social construction, but because any representation of the individual is, at the same time, a representation of the social bonds that are inherent to it [...] society begins with the individual, and that is why the individual can be an object of anthropological study.â 3 Daniel Romanoâs work could be placed on this line. His interest in portraying postures, habits and movements that connected people repeat is not a pointless exercise, but a patient investigation which draws attention to shared signs acquired by individuals to the point of becoming so natural, they appear socially established. This is the thesis which underlies this group of photographs and to test it, the artist performs bona fide fieldwork. In his essay âEl artista como etnĂłgrafoâ4 (The Artist as Ethnographer), Hal Foster highlights the tendency of some contemporary artists to investigate the social and cultural structure; a job that, traditionally, was performed by an anthropologist. For the American theorist in these works, âthe artist does something similar to formal reflexivity; he is a self-conscious reader of culture understood as text.â5 Nevertheless, Daniel RomanoÂŽs purpose is perhaps not so ambitious and it does not need to be projected onto society as a whole. A portrayal of subjects who have some kind of bond that links them emerges from the images. Even though we do not know with any certainty what that is, we can surmise that it is that very bond which causes the similarities in their behavior. They are possibly relatives, friends, co-workers, couples; people with some sort of relationship that justifies identifying them as pairs. These groups are the target of the artist, and this is where his thesis becomes unique. It is not about detecting the traces of a model of social imposition, or the signs of deeply rooted rituals, but to propose some sort of speculation about emotional relationships; where they stop being sentimental, conscious and close, to go deep into the body, the habits, the movements - everyday life - as insignificant, unconscious and trivial acts, but no less meaningful. These acts, which are also public, translate into a powerful empathy, an essential understanding beyond words, an implied commitment that manifests itself in tiny details, usually unnoticed, but visible to others nevertheless. An important part of Daniel Romanoâs work is to invite the observer to deduce those possible bonds. Like him, the audience does not have any information about the people captured in the moment or the process in which their actions become synchronized. We do know, however, that the artist has captured those situations and what we are seeing has been filtered through his view. We also know that there is no manipulation of those images. This moment of truth encourages the observers to make their own inferences and conclusions, to put themselves in the place of the photographer and to be involved in the decoding of connecting signs, using their analytical abilities. However, this moment of truth challenges the notion of photographic representation. The original snapshot freezes a moment in time, it crystallizes a circumstantial configuration of reality in a lasting image, and in doing so extends in time a situation that only lasted an ephemeral moment in front of the camera. This is the moment of the artful device of every technical reproduction in the world: the moment in which the intervention of the device that produces the image represents a manipulation of empirical information and so the creation of a new reality. One may wonder, or perhaps should wonder, what the real duration of the synchronicity the photograph shows as an irrefutable fact was. Did it continue after the moment the photo was taken? Is it the result of genuine unconscious simultaneous actions or the product of a happy coincidence? Up to what point is the artist involved in the construction of that image that doesnât raise any doubt? Daniel Romano assumes the responsibility of his intervention when he decides to bring together all these pictures. The collection of hundreds of images of people that always seem to be performing similar actions is the height of the artful device. In this act, he shows his true intention, absolutely different from documenting reality in a photographic montage, but rather creating an authentic authorial essay. Actually, Pair gives expression to a vision of interpersonal relationships that goes beyond the choice of a subject, the determination of the framing and the taking of the shots. Its guiding thread is the personal drive of the artist to get closer to an event with which he totally identifies himself after long years of living as part of a couple. In each repeated pose, in each similar expression, there is something of the world, but, above all, there is a big part of him. Photography is the means that allows him to share his ideas with others, a vehicle for reflection and eagerness that exceeds the procedures and techniques of making the image. In his book Hacia una filosofĂa de la fotografĂa 6 (Towards a Philosophy of Photography), VilĂ©m Flusser affirms that the photographer is a slave to the device he uses, as he can hardly make decisions over a group of elements standardized by the technology of the machine. Devices impose certain ways of seeing and reproducing reality; they are programmed to create their images according to parameters established by the industry and the prevailing values that dictate the qualities of a âgood photograph.â According to his view, the artist who uses a camera and follows the rules of how it works, is doomed to adopt those parameters and cannot have truly authentic freedom of expression. Daniel Romano escapes from that Flusserian affirmation putting his own agenda before the agenda of the device. Even though his photographs use some of the essential technical resources âthe framings, the snapshots, the telephoto lens- they project beyond them in respect of their goals and ambitions, and when doing so, they transcend the formal limits of the device. The discursive posture behind the images gives a conceptual coherence and depth to the series, establishing a unity that subsumes, and at the same time strengthens, individual images. This unity, which connects the set of images as a whole, is evident from the first to the last photograph. Sometimes, it appears in visual rhythms, in echoes that invite them to be seen with freshness and intelligence. But, essentially, it appears as a proposition, a search and a desire; a proposition that praises the microphysics of interpersonal bonds, a search for their deep signs and a desire that embodies the endless multiplicity of pairs. NOTES 1. AugĂ©, Marc. Los no lugares. Espacios del anonimato. Una antropologĂa de la sobremodernidad. Barcelona: Gedisa, 1993. 2. Ibidem. 3. Ibidem. 4. Foster, Hal. âEl artista como etnĂłgrafo,â in El retorno de lo real. Madrid: Akal, 2001. 5. Ibidem. Highlighted in the original. 6. Flusser, VilĂ©m. Hacia una filosofĂa de la fotografĂa. Mexico: Trillas, 1990. Rodrigo Alonso He is a Bachelor of Arts specialized in contemporary art and new technologies. Theorist and researcher in the technological art field, he is a point of reference of the history and present of that production in Latin America. He has published several essays and books on the subject and regularly contributes to newspapers, art magazines and catalogues. As an independent curator, he has set up exhibitions at important Argentine and international institutions. Among his most recent exhibitions we can mention: Sistemas, acciones y procesos, 1965-1975 (FundaciĂłn Proa, Buenos Aires, 2011), Situating No Land (Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, 2011),Tales of Resistance and Change (Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, 2010) and ÂĄAfuera! Arte en espacios pĂșblicos (CĂłrdoba, Argentina, 2010, with Gerardo Mosquera), among many others. In 2011, he was the curator of the Argentine group that participated in the 54° Venice Biennale. He teaches at different universities in Argentina, Latin America and Europe, both for university students and graduates. He also acts as judge and consultant in contests, prizes and international foundations. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
