Alex Majoli’s scene is his new work about political demonstrations, humanitarian emergencies, and quiet moments of daily life. It is no ordinary work. What attracts me most at the beginning is the visual drama of the body of work, as if the work was shot in the middle of the night illuminated by the moon or in a staged movie. The theatricality of the work plays an important role for the idea and the concept behind, “we human beings as actors playing our own roles in society, and I set out to discover the best way to photographically and aesthetically represent this.”
For Alex, his idea and concept that, we are all actors and the world is our stage. And literally, he and his assistant took strobe lights to the “scenes of reality” and actively put a stage for the people to perform. What’s most interesting is that when this was happening, people who entered the “stage” automatically felt like they need to perform. Being photographed became an expectation rather than an interruption as David Campany said. Especially since the ever presence of smartphones, surveillance cameras, and the daily deluge of images, the value of photography has changed.
“It’s all about perception,” he says. “The more I documented and lived the lives of others, the more I realised that; what really is real, what really is true. Which is the right way to view reality? And I don’t think that one way’s better than another.”
Jim Casper mentioned in the LensCulture article “But why this mood? Why this visual strategy? Is it a statement about the uncertain and tense dark political days we are living through? The lack of brightness and contrast brings a heaviness to the work, and actually makes it difficult to see and appreciate the rich abundance of details and interactions at play in each image.”
Other than the theatricality, what else do the images want to translate? I’m not sure. What’s certain is that, he has brought the theatre to our reality, our daily lives, and that when this is done so, even us, as just normal human beings, somehow psychologically turned us as into actors and actresses, to perform, to act to dramatise. And by removing the colours and dramatising the lighting in executing these images, all is left are the actions and faces of these “actors” and “actresses”, accentuating the fictionality – as like scenes in movies, playing with the philosophical question of “are we really just actors in the life we staged?”
References:
https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/alex-majoli-scene-theatricality-life/
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