Derek Fernandes

Artist: Derek Fernandes/Brazil/24

Sourced from: online blog I Need A Guide http://ineedaguide.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/derek-fernandes.html

Body of Work: Series Untitled.

I found the work of this Brazilian photographer on one of my favourite blogs Ineedaguide and what immediately attracts me to these works is the warmth and spiritedness that dances through the two combined/blended images. In some images below a silhouette appears blended into a background, breaking down barriers of timespace, presenting a world of imagination that has manifested through the photographic medium. Its grainy and gritty, film appears to have been destructed and I imagine memory in its tactile form - fragile to the point of ephemerality - so easily lost/destroyed/smeared.

I realise that these works speak directly to my interest in perspectives on memory and the idea of nostalgia.

Personally I am intrigued by how we filter our memories into the present - how we can understand events of our past to make sense of the present and future.  

      Memory

1. the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.
2. 
   
3. Nostagia
4. 
   

   1. a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past.

Photography at its very core emanates a potential for nostalgia by collecting and cementing the visual dimension of an event into a document to be stored. The notion of looking at a photograph involves recollecting past whether the individual was involved in the image or not the photograph has the ability to summon present thought into the past to reimagine the past from the perspective of the future. 

This is where the truth of an image is called into question - we can see immediately in the photo series below that images have been manipulated as our eyesight does not allow for the perspective that these images are showing. This imagined image begs the question what is the artist trying to stir and create? 

My reading is that there is an effort to re-create the feeling that a location can stir. For example the first image seems like "At that exact moment I felt so free" so the image has a grainy film like quality and the body is wide open to the endless possibilities of the sky.

The blending of these two images(above) rings even truer to the sentiment of calling upon a memory. This silhouette elegantly appears as a window through to the scene behind.