Zach
- Oct 6, 2021

PRAISE NO GOD

by Albert Font

These hauntingly beautiful photographs are a personal container for a cosmos of guilt, violence, and pain. None of this is said, but everything is built on atmosphere and into an environment that feels passive and sparsely populated.

Many of the photographs appear to represent long-term scenes fed by the harsh reflection of the sun that often casts faces in partial shade. The photographs show a fondness for alienated compositions in which the faces of the statues are shown in the frame with an oppressive emptiness. Sometimes the figures are placed in the central part of the frame with huge gray skies above them, as if the entire burden of oneself was weighing on them.

These photographs possess sensory pleasures, among them reliefs dominated by the silky structures of the typefaces on the stones and a mastery of time and place that allows viewers to feel that they have been on the same bleak path as the intriguing protagonists of the photographs.

It is one thing to set up a striking black and white composition and quite another to attract people to it. Pushing things back as much as these photographs do is what I want to offer and show it as an intellectual exercise, an emotional experience for everyone. It is an austere technique countered by bleeding emotions.

The intimate drama unfolds in the expressive use of silence and the portrait within the narrative of the deceased. There is a faintly charming image of intergenerational bonding that combines different emotions that take their last breath of secular air before surrendering their life to the Lord.