LORENZO HAS #1'S FROM A-Z AND THEN-SOME! (PHOTO ROMANS 01)
  WORK IN PROGRESS
  RUNNING TIME: To be determined
MEDIUM: Photographs, mixed media
YEAR: To be determined
PRODUCTION: Public Radio and Camera Assembly
  Letter to Vincent - August 7, 2006 (excerpts)

Guy, thanks for your e-mail. It was actually super inspiring and a flood of ideas came to me immediately after reading it. I'm armed with my digital stills camera and a Mini DV camera (not my expensive one). I was going to bring my 35mm SLR and Super 8, but my bag was already full. Next time I come I'm gonna bring one bag with nothing but media equipment and cameras etc.

I was already working on some projects involving stills and audio, but you gave me the idea to document my trip -- to make something more personal.

...

I came to New York because of recent major disappointments ... I don't want to get into it because I haven't resolved them for myself yet, but I kind of ran away to New York to clear my head.

...

I think I wrote too much so I wanna leave you with an image that I'm sure you'll appreciate:

6.00PM sunshine on a Saturday. I was walking down 9th St. at Ave. A and I stopped in front of Giant Robot. I looked up and saw a cute girl poking her body out of her third-storey window to adjust the window box of flowers on her fire escape. Her cat pranced about on the sill. The curtain flapped in the breeze.
  PHOTO ROMANS

The Photo Romans series are narratives told through still images and sound. The succession of static pictures is an inquiry into that fundamental principle of cinema: the illusion of motion. If cinema is a time-based art, where elapse is required for communication to occur, then is a single, static frame rendered non-cinematic? After all, cinema is a collection of thousands of static images: The specator's understanding of the film's ideas is synchronous with -- runs parallel to -- the succession of each static image, in the same manner that a reader's understanding of a novel occurs with the passing of each word. But in film, the spectator is not able to discern each of the twenty-four frames per second, but rather sees phrases of images -- the blurring of frames as they persist in one's vision to resemble motion. Photo Romans deconstructs the illusion of motion, communicating ideas and telling stories frame by frame, word by word. Photo Romans is influenced by Raoul Coutard, who refers to certain narrative photography exhibitions as "photo-romances", and by the films Salut les Cubains (Agnès Varda) and La Jetée (Chris Marker).
  CREDITS | CLIP | STILLS | TEXT