What makes the difference?

   © Guillermo Labarca

A few days ago, Susan (Bilbao), a member of this magazine, asked me: “Do you consider Vivian Maier and artista?”, I said: “of course”, she looked at me sceptically and said: “she’s a good photographer”, which made me think further. The question came back to me while looking at the brochure of an exhibition of Koudelka that I had visited at Mapfre Foundation. I have no doubt that Koudelca is an artist and, now, I think that Vivian Maier is not one, what makes the difference?

Before sending a couple of ideas about the subject I’d like to mention that I don’t believe there exists some kind of hierarchy that puts artista-photographers over photo-journalists or Street photographers, they are simply different ways of capturing reality, which is in itself very complex and requires all posible approaches, that are besides complimentary to one another.

Is it necessary to set a definition of piece of art to distinguish what enters such category or not? The problem is that there already exist too many definitions of art, from the one that settles “art is what is sold as art” to the one that says that a piece of art is “an object created by a human being that reveals the truth of what exists”. However, such definitions do not respond to our question. It seems better to get into the pieces adn try to understand their message, even if in a comprissed way… We don’t have much space here, so we’ll just jump into conclusions without discussing the process that led us to them.

In Koudelca’s work we can see that he grabs the subject of the image exposed, no matter if the subject is the soviet invasión of Prague in 1968, or the gypsies in the centre of Europe, or the peasant people, or the Wall in Israel. He arrogates them all through reason, also through emotion, and he makes them his. He makes such arrogation with pain and happiness, tenderness and compassion. His commitment to others, which sometimes is also a political commitment, is also part of the process of arrogation. Then he creates images that show how he has built up the captured momento. His photographs are made of layers which contain multiple meanings, but still all of them unified in one image. In order to achieve this, he needs to use all his technical resources, organization of the frame, angle, etc…, decisions on effects to use, in brief, all his know-how. The audience must look and peel the different layers and then find the richness of the image.

There is other artists who play with different resources so as to build a complex piece of art, such as Ansel Adams, Cartier Bresson, Helmut Newton or Cristina Garcia Rodero. They use emotional, intelectual and technical resources whic are different to the ones Koidelca uses, but all of them become owners of the subject of the photograph: people, landscape, actions or objects. There is no more space to develop the idea any further here, there will be more chances in the future.