Carlo D'Orta Italia, b. 1955

I am a fine-art photographer, an artist in the photography branch. I use the camera not to document or report, but to extract from reality pictorial and abstract images that actually exist, but almost never know how to see.

My main subject is architecture. And my art is above all a search for the synthesis, the essential forms, the geometric combinations produced by the overlapping and interweaving of architectural structures that populate our cities. I'm not interested in buildings in themselves, nor in reality at first sight. I focus on lines, intersections, combinations of shapes. This is why I look for particular perspectives, unusual points of view, angles and visual glimpses from which the architectures are mixed in a dialogue of lines, shapes, contrasts of light and color that takes on an almost biological meaning.

My photographs can sometimes look like collages, but they are not. The intersections of shapes and geometries are not realized in post-production or at the computer, but they really exist in reality: they are the result of perspective and the search for points of view from which distinct structures and forms, physically separated from each other, appear instead to our look as if merged and united.

This is the meaning above all of my “Biocities” series, which has its roots and deepest inspiration in the abstract art of Mondrian, Malevich, El Lissitzky, Rothko, Peter Halley, in the photography of Franco Fontana and Lucien Hervé and perhaps - just for the effort to go with my shots beyond the physical data, to arrive at a new meta-reality - even in the vision of the metaphysical cities and squares of De Chirico. And it is also the meaning of the Geometrie Still Life series, which differs from Biocities because it focuses on classic Mediterranean architectures rather than contemporary ones.

But, in his profound difference, even the series of landscapes that I titled “Vibrations” responds to the same basic logic. Here my goal is focused on crystal glass and metal surfaces that reflect, deforming, the architecture all around. The fruit are images between the abstract and the surrealist, in which the shapes of the original architectural structures dissolve into games of lights and colors that are absolutely unpredictable. They are images that exist in reality, but they change immediately and even disappear as soon as one moves one step. Here sometimes I modify the colors in post-production (but only the colors, never the shapes). And here the deep inspiration, what leads me to seek and find these visions, is probably in Futurism, with the lesson of Balla, Boccioni, Carrà and Severini, and in Surrealism and Modernism, especially with the architectural lesson of Gaudì.

To explain my way of looking and photographing I like to quote the phrases of three great men of culture:

"If you want to teach the human eye to see in a new way, it is necessary to show him everyday and familiar objects from totally different perspectives, situations and angles" (Aleksnadr M. Rodchenko)

"The journey of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in having new eyes" (Marcel Proust)

"Creative photography should not reproduce, but interpret making the invisible visible" (Franco Fontana)