This video is a record of Imago, my photography installation at Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square, MA.
Imago was on display between June 2011 and April 2012. When it was time to take the show down, I didn’t know if I’d ever see the 45 pieces together again, so I walked the halls with a video camera. Here is that raw footage, along with my original soundtrack.
[youtube http://youtu.be/ei3-IOn69oI]
When I take a photograph – that’s to say, when I discover an image – I enter an altered state of awareness – it’s like getting stoned. In the rough video here, I move the camera as if I’m returning to that place, trying to get back inside each image.
The music consists of three free improvisations that I recorded around the time I was taking the photographs in Imago. A free improvisation is a completely spontaneous act of music making, with no planning and no theory – for me it has been a way to find my voice. In these clips I play guitars by German Vazquez-Rubio and Stephan Connor.
This video is 32 minutes. The soundtrack has some ambient noise and some humming toward the end. I’d like to produce a shorter version at some point, but here’s the raw material for those willing to look and listen.
From the show’s opening announcement:
Rudi has put together this collection of what he calls “found images” – candid photographs that explore the wonder of the ordinary world. He is interested in the way photography can inspire us to look closer at the things we pass by everyday – a bit of peeling paint or rusting metal, a feather on the sidewalk, or the shadow of a chain link fence. He explores “the random grace of light” – the way sunshine reveals the interest in whatever it happens to touch. Rudi’s closeup perspectives and attention to texture give viewers the sense they can almost reach out and feel the objects depicted – common things rendered strangely beautiful by an uncommon perspective. The photographs now on display in CIC are the record of a year’s worth of close observation in places ranging from Kendall Square to Mahabalipuram, India. Rudi works with digital equipment but avoids cropping or editing his images after capture – keeping them as close as possible to what he saw in the moment, and what you too might see with your own eyes if you stop and take notice.
The word imago can mean:
an image – as in “imago dei,” the image of God
the adult form of an insect after metamorphosis
the idealized mental image of a loved one ■