Entrevista (Inter-view)

By Rosana Schoijett

There was a fountain silver-clear and bright…
its waters were unsullied…Here Narcissus lay down.
The Metamorphosis, Ovid

Interview. Entrevoir (fr): what is espied, what is discerned.

Mirror. Speculum gave rise to the word speculation”: originally to speculate meant to observe the sky and the movements of the stars with the help of a mirror.

To look through a camera’s viewfinder is to perceive reality as reflected in a play of mirrors hidden inside the camera.

The reflection of light or reality entails a sort of illusion, like the illusion that water captures the moon; on its screen-surface, water, in turn, receives and returns the light of the sun.

My work as a media photographer has allowed me to develop the skill of portraying people and situations in public life. The production of these images places me at the very heart of the ambiguous likeness of photography and reality.

At the heart of the duality between a fact and its double as reflected on a surface, between recording evidence and constructing stories, between information and fiction.

The interview, with its crossing of questions and answers, also serves as a screen for reflection and projection for the person being interviewed and the interviewer, as well as for the person who later participates in the encounter through the resulting images.

In this work in progress, I attempt to shift to the field of the visual arts the interview genre as an image-generating structure, stripping it of its oral nature. The method consists of requesting an interview/visit, setting up the lighting in the chosen setting, and photographing the encounter, thus generating a space in which the daily and the fictional coexist.

This operation provides me with a formal framework in which to investigate the relationships that human beings establish with the Other.  

All of the photographs make use of horizontal framing to accentuate the predominance of the screen’s landscape, rectangular format. At the same time, each interview deals with the different types of relationships as a photographic sequence, thus attempting to observe as well the relationships established between the images themselves.

In the final installation, the photographs in each sequences are mixed up in the hopes of producing a centripetal viewing of them and evidencing the simultaneity of the junctures: connections with the work, with the self, relationships with emotion, with disease, with death, the convergence of mass media and art, of reality and its reflection.

The Inter-View project participated in the Arteba-Petrobras de Artes Visuales prize in 2007.