“But we are no longer concerned with inner or outer reality or its volume as much as with the spirit of living reality … We want, in short, to record reality unrealistically.”
– Anton Giulio Bragaglia

New Photodynamism is a manifesto on the role of experimental photography in the age of visual communication. The thesis is a call for practitioners of experimental photography as an art form to expand the range of photographic semiotics by heeding the thoughts of Bragaglia, Flusser, Coburn and others. The work is presented as a series of postcards containing the text of the manifesto as well as works by many artists working with experimental photographic processes. This includes Abelardo Morell, Charles Lindsay, James Welling, Shimpei Takeda, Meghann Riepenhoff, John Chiara and others. The work was made as the result of a research project undertaken at LUCA School of Arts from 2015-2016.

Read the full text and see the images:
www.newphotodynamism.be

Excerpt:

So this is what we do:  We break our lenses and disrespect our film, hack our firmware and overheat our sensors. We use lines, squares and pin pricks as our apertures and seduce every random sort of shutter. We merge pixels with grain, use entire rolls or sheets of anything light-sensitive.  We make our own papers, expose our materials to light we cannot see. We neglect lenses with their hegemonic color coatings, and betray any rules of focus or composition that have been handed to us. We demand open software, we will write it ourselves if need be.  We reach beyond flatness in our imagery to the third and fourth dimensions. We choose the dynamism of Bragaglia over the dynamic range of industrialized gimmickry. We remain impartial to the means of light capture, so long as we are not told how it should be used. We do whatever is necessary to retain control of our means of expression. We eschew banal fidelity, sharpness and resolution, instead demanding trueness of spirit, precision of vision, expansion of experience and depth of consciousness. We reclaim and expand the photographic work of alchemists and inventors. We channel the experience of photography as magic.