Daniel Muchiut
© Daniel Muchiut
Curatorial Comment
Daniel Muchiut is a photographer, filmmaker and curator. He lives in Argentina. He was born in the city of Chivilcoy, province of Buenos Aires, on November 3, 1967.
What does the above tell us about the photographer and his work? Actually very little except for the social and political context of the time and place. We learn more about him as a photographer through his photographs, his commitment to a vision of photography in humanism and to the indigenous people he worked with. The VASA exhibition through six “visual essays” sets a framework for understanding his work.
Researching the work of an image-maker, it is the persistence of vision that talks loudly about them; images over time. Too often we measure the value of work through the market place, what sells and what does not, what is popular and what is published. Exhibitions and publications may tell us more about the curator and editor than about the photographer. In either case, it is the production of work, the points of decision in editing (my image makers, curators, editors and publishers). Reviewing contact sheets with images marked for printing or cropping my reveal how a photographer (or editor) worked through a space or idea. The viewer usually only experiences the final form and not the process. This process, as a trail of decisions, becomes more difficult to access with digital photography. Missing in digital photography, working from the screen, is the removal of the traces left behind in the process of editing, there are no markups, no crop lines and no lines around images to indicate selection and rejection. As draft essays, marked up with comments and changes, helped the researcher to understand the thinking of writers; so did the contact sheet. At this point it is important to note that the presented work is not the process, but only a finial point in the flow of decision-making.
As Nathan Lyons often noted, it is the “acts of decision” as a decisive moment that informs us about the values and positions held by the author. It is the “moment of decision”, to press the shutter, to stand where you stand, that speaks to the internal perceptions of photographers. In opposition to the notion of the “decisive moment” as proclaimed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lyons pointed to the decision made by the individual as what is the most critical to understand. How many times did Cartier-Bresson photograph a man jumping over a puddle till he recorded the image that he wanted and held it up as “the decisive moment”?. Different from digital photography, Cartier-Bresson needed to process his film before he could select the negative he would call the “decisive moment”. For the student of photography considering the “moments” recorded as actual decision points is critical to understanding the workings of oneself as image-maker. How does one image lead to the next?
Henri Cartier-Bresson contact sheet, Google search result 9-28-2017
In the Google search below you can see how Ruth Orkin recorded at least two expousers of her now famous image.
Ruth Orkin contact sheet, Google search result 9-28-2017
Returning to the VASA exhibition by Daniel Muchiut the reader may consider the moments selected by him for his visual essays. A number of his contact sheets are included here demonstrating how he worked through villages and personal spaces of the people he recorded as well as his editing decisions. (This exhibition refers to his work as essays because they are constructed as text. All individual and later sequenced images work as a text to be read first by its author and second by a reader/viewer. All images are codified and at various levels packed with potential interpretive meaning.) His work may appear to be casual, photographed on the move, fluid. This sense of “being there” suggests that the people have known him over time, he was welcomed into their homes, there are no pretensions to the camera. As a photographer he did not intrude with his camera (himself), set-up situations for their picture-worthiness, or select they most photogenic. (This attitude is displayed in the film “LEQUEYO” included in this exhibition.) This manner of working, over time, gaining trust, a commitment to the people and the place, seeing possible relationships within the image and between images, provides to the viewer or reader insightful moments to “see” and be seen. Taking the metaphor “the images as mirror”, images are not only created as a result of technology and decision, but by the reader of the text. This could be understood as what is seen, and what is understood. One image pulled from Muchiut’s work tells us very little about the people, place and Muchiut himself. It is through the flow of the work, the viewer’s investment in and between each image that meaning is constructed building a contextualized sympathy. We feel we know something.
Framed in his work is the notion and purpose of humanistic documentary photography. There is a rich historical frame for the photographer and the camera recording or documenting what is in front of the lens. (For decades the veracity of the image has been called into question and further complicated by the shift to digital photography and its ability to be manipulated.) The demystification of the image as an objective decision point, a perspective given by the photographer and camera, has provided rich soil for questions about the subjective nature of the document and what is being photographed and why. There is an understanding that photographs are about where you stand and when you decide to “click”.
From this perspective we can consider: “Are the people and structures appearing in Muchiut’s images the subject of his work, or is the subject the social political realities of their lives?” Not the images but what they refer to. Do photographs reveal or only refer to the knowledge and political position of its reader and the photographer (including curators, editors and publishers). Considering the exhibition from this perspective opens the question referring to the location of “a” meaning over “the” meaning of an image. I would argue that meaning is never fixed; it is dialectical, historical and fluid. Daniel’s images do not exist in isolation from other images (and their social political historical moments) and contexts, they are part of it.
© Roberto Muffoletto 2017
Unless noted all images on this page © Daniel Muchiut