Critical Introduction: Photography
George Whale's gallery Displaced
Cultures exhibits the dislocation and displacement of the cultures
embedded in the Canary Islands. His images aim to convey the message that the
Canary Islands native heritage is fading behind the bombardment of other
international cultures due to fact that the Canaries have become a
notorious tourist destination over the past few decades.
After the fall of Franco and the
establishment of the democratic constitutional monarchy, the Canary Islands
were granted an autonomous community of Spain status. They are islands located
just off the North West of Africa, which have experienced prosperity, in
contrast with extreme poverty, piracy, mass emigration. It's now one of Spain’s
main tourist destinations, with over 1.5 million tourists visiting from the UK
alone in 2013.
The Islands once acted as a bridge
between Europe and the United States of America and which made an important
contribution to the history and culture of the Islands, exposing them to many
different influences, especially European influences and African ones. The
diverse mixture of different cultures in the Canary Islands has forged a unique
and peculiar history for the Canary Islands, one which has dislodged it from
it's native identity.
Whilst in Tenerife, Whale explored
the town of Los Cristianos to capture his images, obeying professional
photographic procedures such as the rule of thirds and golden ratio to gain an
aesthetically pleasing image base before altering the image files .jpg script
coding. Inspired by Melanie Willhide's to Adrian Rodriguez, with
love, a project dedicated to the man thief who stole her laptop and
corrupt her hard drive in 2010. The images she managed to recover were from the
corrupted hard drive had transformed, giving them a glitch like aesthetic,
which construct new meanings to the photographs. Displaced Cultures aims to
reinforce the meaning dislocation by distorting his images with a similar
process.
Whale's exhibition displays the
new possibilities in an increasing digital medium with his project
on Displaced Cultures. American photographer, Ansel Adams once
said "you don't take a photograph, you make it!" Whale's exhibition
portrays this ideology with his photographs - technically and aesthetically.
