The technique of photo-finish, which I started to use and reinvent in the early Seventies, involves deconstruction and recomposition and other plastic phenomena which call to mind certain computerized graphic processing. It is essentially about the creation of a series of real time movements, and sudden stops. So the figure taken enters in to conflict with a fixed image positioned in the viewfinder of the camera itself. In this way, one establishes unrelenting contact with a moving figure which at the same time is transformed into another , in a continual mutation of the figure (the other) blocked inside. The traditional fissured line is substituted by a fragment of image, perhaps even of the very face taken, or his signature, or any other part belonging to him or not; a face “forced” to pass through its own face, its own signature, or swallowed up by the graphic grid of itself. I have photographically dissected an entire body and inserted it piece by piece into the photo-finish camera so that the image can be analyzed with fragments of itself. Its identity is turned inside out and scaled through the slender thickness of the interposed fragment. As many identities as possible modelled on a single one, inert, face with unexpected plastic resolutions, with progressive movements and actions, as if struck by an inserted “twisted” memory. These faces of Tokyo from the darkness make their way toward the “signs” that I have gathered throughout the city, toward my paradoxical photo-motionpicture camera, my obscure lapis.
Paolo Gioli