“Truths and Fictions” – Another Theory of Relativity – Zone Zero and Pedro Meyer.
ZoneZero © is a great find if you have not discovered it. Its founder, Pedro Meyer, a Mexican photographer ‘of great stature’ in terms of quality of his images and ethics in the industry, has been working on the transition between analog and digital photography.
zonezero
As stated on the web site :-
ZoneZero © is dedicated to photography. Its name intends to be a metaphor for the journey from analog to digital image making. One of the references comes from “The Zone System” a fine example of the analog heritage in photography made so famous by Ansel Adams. From the analog dark room we are now moving to the digital one; where everything analog is transformed into digits represented through the infinite combinations of either zeros or ones.
Take a joyous run through the galleries , portfolios and profound editorial comments and you will discover, firstly the relationships between Latin America and the rest of the world and secondly the relationship between photography and expressions of truth and fiction represented through many eyes.
Some examples:
From the ‘Galleries‘ section: Helen Zout -Argentina
Boy with AIDS
A boy infected with AIDS plays at his house. The boy was born by a prostitute who gave him up for adoption. Another woman legally adopted him knowing that he carried the virus.
Children – bearers of AIDS
Life for children with AIDS is very complex, they have an uncertain future, and a very complex present. Sometimes the children are cared for by their parents, but it is more common for the relatives or grandparents of the AIDS infected children to provide the care, because most often, the AIDS infected parents are sick and in no condition to care for them, or they are dead.
There are many cases in which these children are neglected and abondoned, or where a judge decides to leave them in the public hospitals.
In most cases, after the commotion surrounding the initial illness is over, the resiliency, tenacity and courage exhibited by the children, their parents and family and the hospital staff is amazing.
The future for the children who carry the AIDS virus is always uncertain, because, were a cure to be discovered their lives would be radically altered .
Love is a fundamental contributing factor to the health of the people infected with AIDS. And, while the love and attention won’t cure them, it is does prolong their life expectancy.
In most of my pictures I do not show the patients faces because I want to preserve their identities from a society that stigmatizes and condemns those who bear the AIDS virus. That is why I decided to use masks, or other objects, to obscure the identity of the subjects in my photographs.
Helen Zout
An example from ‘Portfolios’ : Camilo Andrés Matiz Zamorano – Chile
Free fall
This small collection of urban snapshots depicts individuals of all ages that share the overwhelming sentiment of briefness that submerges them in the painful fleeting and relentless postmodernity.
Camilo Andrés Matiz Zamorano
In the magazine section there are articles and reviews of exhibitions , books etc
Tianamen 1989
“Looking at Pictures in East and West”
por Hans Durrer (Switzerland)
“There is no reason to assume that a Thai, when looking at a photograph of the Eiffel Tower, should see a different Eiffel Tower than, say, a Swiss does. What Thai eyes and Swiss eyes register is the same, how they interpret it might however be another story.
Our interpretations of pictures depend not least on our cultural upbringing. The famous picture of the lonely man facing the tanks on Tiananmen Square in 1989, for instance, has been read, by the Western media, as a symbol of exceptional bravery in the face of a massive threat, whereas the official Chinese reading saw it as an expression of extraordinary restraint by the tank commander.”
truegrain software
“TrueGrain is a pro-grade tool for accurately recapturing the aesthetics of black and white film with digital photography.
With TrueGrain, you can:
-Accurately recapture the aesthetics of particular film stocks—including “lost” films—while retaining an all-digital workflow.
-Creatively employ credible film aesthetics.
-Add high resolution film grain information to digital images to elegantly minimize the pixilation effects of upsampling.
-Match digital imagery to existing film images for restoration and compositing purposes.“
Browsing through the archives of zone zero you will not only discover a wider world of images that you do not often see but you are left with much to think about as the issues that are raised through the images cover the whole breadth of humanity.