Dali

Here’s a shot of one of the wonderful Dali sculptures that I came across in Barcelona, and that seem to be dotted throughout Spain at large. I’m often struck when travelling by how incomparably more interesting European public art is compared to the predictable statues of politicians and exiled writers that we Irish seem to enjoy erecting so very much.

And since I’m thinking about Dali today, I thought that I’d share one of my favourite photos ever. This is Dali’s “atomicus”. This amazing shot apparently took 28 attempts to get right, and as a result probably isn’t also going to be a cat lover’s favourite photograph. However, one can’t help but admire the bravado of Dali and the ingenuity of the photographer Philippe Halsman in nailing such a busy shot with so many elements to get just right.

The real magic of this shot for me is that it is a record of a specific moment in time back in 1948, in which 3 cats and a bucket of water were flying through the air, whilst Salvador Dali was jumping and his assistant held up a chair at the edge of the frame. This photo therefore has value as a document of a moment in time. This makes it an indexical photo that refers to a specific historical event. In modern times it’s hard to imagine anybody taking the time to create and execute such a shot instead of just designing it on a computer screen through Photoshop.

Photoshop creates iconic images that can represent a cat flying through the air, but because these images are created on a computer screen and are only a representation of an image that occurred in an artist’s mind rather than a record of an actual event in time, these are not photographs, but pieces of digital art.

So please do enjoy one of the greatest photographs ever created and ask yourself if such a photo was created in post production on an image processing programme could it ever possibly have the same impact?

April 19, 2012 | Categories: black and white, Europe, photography, photography theory, statue, straight photography, travel, unmanipulated, writing | Tags: art, atomicus, Barcelona, cats, Dali, image manipulation, Photoshop, public art, Salvador, sculpture, semiotics, Spain, travel | 1 Comment »