18th Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest Altered Images
Dialogues with the past

Ancient Asian painting depicting grandiose landscapes is a classic, very distinctive and imitated to this day. This monochrome painting is not afraid of empty space, where only the shadow from the subject is depicted, which ultimately creates watercolor, delicate and linear outlines. They did not draw on a piece of paper, for them it was a space and rather a substance from which they “extract” shadows, rather than apply them to the sheet. By changing the gradient of the original photographs, I tried to achieve a similarity to the classic Asian style of painting with black ink. Even the process of “revealing” shadows by means of technology is like a parallel through time, where already other means can express the same aesthetics. Technology is now directly affecting art. It can sometimes tell us more than ourselves. Here it helps to see and extract the invisible physically from the visible and create something new within the usual. It is already becoming an art that can reflect something deeper than a photographically accurate image. Set priorities and accents, concentrate on one thing, ignoring the other. This is a dialogue with classical painting and photography, a dialogue with the past: its stimulation, not destruction. Questions about how to modernize it and put up a quotation for certain things that correspond to a given culture and the spirit of the time.

Photo Detail
Date Taken: 08.2020
Date Uploaded: 09.2020
Photo Location: Seoul, South Korea
Camera: Canon EOS 7D Mark II
Copyright: © Ekaterina Brytkova