photographic artist Ra’z Salvarita
A renaissance of matchbox pinhole and black and white film photography
There’s a distinct black hole where creative visionary and photographic artist Ra’z Salvarita nestles within to incubate a certain mastery of conceptualization that influences his art process—this time, driven by a real sense of “sensitivity” which is a requirement for the art process and a metaphor of the way he observes the loss of sensitivity in the mass culture.
tree branches
“Camera Obscura” is a collection of contemporary photographic works created using a matchbox pinhole camera rolled in with 35mm color film—resulting
to a series of “documentary fiction” style images that borders on abstraction. With the exhibition collection are classic black-and-white photographs, which have been preserved for a decade or so—a compilation of images from the walk-around Isla del Fuego trip by Ra’z who was then using a Nikon FM10 film camera plugged in with Colpan100 black-and-white negatives that he manually developed inside his little bathroom at Kiki Paintbox Studio along Silliman Avenue extension.
The pinhole experimentation by Ra’z began while living in Ubud, Bali. He would create a number of cameras utilizing matchboxes and place in a negative roll and start shooting. It brought about a deeper appreciation of the process in terms of “sensitivity,” which metaphorically inclined with the lifestyle of living in an ashram.
The challenge then was to find a shop in Bali that would develop the film but to no avail. It took months before the films could be developed in the Philippines—in Dumaguete, at least
the hall
one shop is still running a film processing machine, but the developing device is on its last drop.
The Pinhole Series
In this type of creative process, the element of “surprise” is extremely surprising. Because it
depends truly on the frequency of sensitivity using the mind, instinct, and feeling-sense to read the amount of light and calculate the time to open the curtain to burn the image—an instantaneous process allowing the elements of light, temperature and time to do the “photoshop” without wheeling the mouse.
Due to the immediate environ of the artist’s playground, the thematic direction of the pieces have an urbanite vibe, in a way a documentation of street life is flared in a visually-fictionalized state.
morning walk
The negatives are then printed on tarpaulin, streaming closely on urban art. Ra’z prints the original pinhole photograph and duplicates the same image with just a tweak of color saturation and then cut the two images into strips and interweave them producing another layer of visual presentation and
interpretation and that the final image becomes a pixelated abstract piece—a hint of “destabilizing the conventional status of the image.”
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Walk-around Isla del Fuego:
Colpan100 series
It’s the first time this series has seen the light of day. Taken some 10 years ago using Colpan100 black and white negative, Ra’z,
and friend Wednesday Holiday, embarked on a walking journey around the island of Siquijor and has captured some classic images of the mystic island. This is an
introductory show for this series.
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The exhibition is a celebration for the National Arts Month.
It is currently on show at Kri in
Dumaguete City and will be moved afterwards at the Arthub Studio of Contemporary Art in
Valencia, Negros Oriental. It is presented together with the Network of Artists in Negros Oriental.
