Valentnvallhonrat

Photography is about many things but among others, it is about perspective. This is a multifaceted notion. The photographer chooses the subjects and selects the tools—cameras, lenses, lighting, and so on—that suit the job in mind. Additionally, the photographer must also choose where to stand in relation to his or her subject. The photographer’s perspective determines both his or her point of view and, ultimately how the subject is to be represented.

In his more recent work, Vuelo de Ángel (Angel’s Flight, 2001–03), Valentín Vallhonrat shifts his attention to photographing replicas of important structures, places of spiritual or temporal power. He writes, “The buildings that are represented in these photographs bring with them the condition of a space of power, a space of spirituality, and they are used as symbols of identity, as differential characteristics. These photographs, which for their part are a register of these constructions, lack these attributes, but they let us relate to the attributions and the pre-existing image of these monuments that we have internalized. They let us relate to our own ideology.”

Vallhonrat photographs these constructions bathed in a deep blue light of apparent dawn or dusk that appears to swell the buildings’ volume and render them more theatrically imposing. The deep blue, created by lights or filters—what the French call la nuit americaine and the Americans “day for night” is a classic movie-making technique to simulate nocturnal scenes that are actually photographed during daytime—renders the buildings all but monochrome, darkly romantic, and very mysterious. The small figures seen to be scurrying along, climbing into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing’s Forbidden City or assembling in front of the Yungang Buddha for example, appear like figures in a formidably built scale model railroad.

In their deep-blue solitude the buildings cast no shadows. They emerge from darkness. They simply appear. We are meant to wait and to observe. Vallhonrat writes, “The gigantic Longmen Buddha closes his eyes to illusion while he sits in the lotus position. If we observe this image, we can find keys to the uses of photography and their responsibility in the construction of our description of the world and the knowledge/ignorance we have of it.” The simulacra of famous buildings gradually seep into our consciousness. We recognize them slowly. A castle here, a cathedral there, the White House, the World Trade Center, the Coliseum, a pyramid, a temple, and so on all trigger memories from history books and postcard racks. They resemble what we have seen elsewhere in pictures or in actuality. The photographs show what we think we know.

Yet Vallhonrat performs another trick that alters our perceptions again. Vallhonrat chooses a particularly distancing perspective from which to stage his photographs. He writes, “The focal point of the scene is photographed, and the horizon tends to be placed at two-thirds or three-fourths of the way up. This means that complex shifts have to be made when the building is very high. In this regard, the position of the camera and the photographer are described as angel’s flight.” This perspective’s spiritual dimension cannot be overlooked. Vallhonrat casts his angel’s eye on these places of power and lets us, the spectators, see how he looks at these buildings removed from all other worldly considerations and centered in an unearthly blue light that is itself coming from above.

We look at these simulacra, as he puts it, “without illusions” because that is precisely what they are: illusions. We see them not merely as replicas of famous buildings but also as knowledge systems that are deeply embedded into the ways we think and organize our world. “The choice of substituting buildings as objects to photograph,” he writes, “displays a desire to alert the viewers that they are accomplices, and to point out other options for our perception of what is real, and our capacity to discern and separate reality, discourse, and belief in our own experience.” In other words, Vallhonrat shows us through his photographs that we see what we want to see. We abrogate our responsibility to criticize the structures of power and their simulations. We simply believe in the force majeure of the iconic image that the powers that be have created to control us. Vallhonrat’s brilliant photography and visual language reveal that this mesmerizing hocus pocus is indeed conjured up “out of the blue.”