Critical Introduction

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. 

On a basic level, Whale's exhibition asks what are we seeing when we look at an image - greyscale, pixels, stripes, dot, vintage photography, his work plays with perception. Through the editing method of data bending, Whale tampers with the bytes of the digital image file through corrupting the script coding via TextEdit. Through his manipulation of the coding, the process results with a new visual construction of the photo which appears distorted and 'glitched'. This transfiguration of the image doesn't withdraw it from it's meaning, however it requires the viewer to look deeper into what is being shown in the photographs.

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.