FlashOn Instagramers 1.38: @Gipomontesanto from Sicily

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Each week we discover new and interesting feeds on Instagram. This section FlashOn is an open space where we give a shout out and promote IG users. No need to have thousands and thousands of followers! Soon, it could be your turn!

I follow @Gipomontesanto for  a long time now! Can´t even remember. And every time I see his pics, I always find they have somehing very special. I wanted to share with you this awesome stream.

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GipoMontesant tells us about his passion for photography.

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I am 39 and I live in Sicily, a wonderful island, full of contradictions. In a land like ours (but also everywhere I suppose) If you want satisfied with your pics, best thing you can do is just to observe around you.

Every day, down the street, iPhoneography teachs me the art of observation. Usually, I just wait for the right moment, the right shot and usually it punctually comes! But, remember, a great photographer also have a big trashcan!

My passion for photography was leaving me. I moved all the stages in the past: printing films, buying all kinds of digital cameras to as a consistent user of Photoshop, and so on… But my finger  was slowly forgetting to press the shooting button.

But suddenly something happened!  As a geek and Mac user, I bought an iPhone 3G and in a few weeks I started to experience a new and unexpected photographic passion: iPhoneography. Very soon, I met the Instagramers community and became a real addicted IGer. The Photography flame was not extinguished at all!

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Now I´m in love with photographyagain, thanks to Instagramers Catania @igerscatania, managed by @roccorossitto, I found a new meaning to photography. I´m starving to learn and improve my skills again. In Catania, there are a lot of events, organized by @igerscatania (see web here): Exhibits, meetings, instameets, instawalks, and also trekking on our big volcano Etna. (Instagramers Catania is part of Instagramers Italia Network)

 

A nice thing that strikes everyday, is that Humanity turns out from the people I photograph. I can feel all the sounds, colors and smells of my hometown coming from those candid shots.

Lookin’ for the ‘studium’, sometimes I found out the ‘punctum’.

This quote, you can read in my Instagram profile, contains the meaning and the spirit of my recent works with iPhoneography in the community of Instragramers.

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In his book “Camera Lucida”, Roland Barthes distinguishes between the “studium” and the “punctum” of the photograph. In his personal, subjective, examination of multiple photographs, Barthes proceeded to note a duality that was characteristic of certain photographs: a ‘co-presence of two discontinuous elements’, what he terms, the studium and the punctum.

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The studium refers to the range of meanings available and obvious to everyone; it is unary and coded, the former term implying that the image is a unified and self-contained whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance (without effort, or ‘thinking’); while the latter implies that the pictorial space is ordered in a universal, comprehensible way.

The studium speaks of the interest which we show in a photograph, the desire to study and understand what the meanings are in a photograph, to explore the relationship between the meanings and our own subjectivities.

The punctum (a Latin word derived from the Greek word for trauma) on the other hand inspires an intensely private meaning, one that is suddenly, unexpectedly recognized and consequently remembered (it “shoots out of the photograph like an arrow and pierces me”); it ‘escapes’ language; it is not easily communicable through/with language.

The punctum is a detail or “partial object” that attracts and holds the viewer’s (the Spectator’s) gaze; it pricks or wounds the observer.

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I would just finish remembering a Bob Keefer´s statement: “The camera is, beyond the doubt, the least important element in the making of any photograph”.

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Thanks @Gipomontesanto for your contribution to Instagram and Instagramers.com !

You can follow @gipomontesanto on his Instagram Stream

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@philgonzalez

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