Luis Castelo has a degree in Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). In 1995 he finished his doctored (PhD) in Photography. From 1990 until now he teaches Photography at the Fine Arts University in Madrid. He also participates in masters and he is part of the University Research Group: Art, Science and Nature. He has also written photographic books, magazines and webs.

Luis's statement

I´m visual artist and I had many solo and group exhibitions in and outside Spain.

I began working with flatbed scanners in 1998. I used the digitogram technique (or scannography) to create a digital herbarium and a bestiary. This work was named: Cuaderno de Campo (Fields Notes). After that I was doing other works but all of them based in an interpretation of Nature. Historiae naturalis, Deconstructions, Aquae, or Germination are some examples.

Huygens proclaimed the need for the artist to represent in detail what scientists discovered with their microscopes. Wild life fascinates us just when we are in a more technified and computerized period and at the same time, far away from natural environment.

Technology allows systematization, control, archiving and classification as one never could have dreamed of, in a moment of scientific climax in Europe.

Order and classification is a characteristic of the scientific world and serves to knowledge acquisition. The human beings have the necessity of bringing order to chaos; ordering what apparently is chaotic is needed for their mental structure.

Isolating a life being from natural environment on a strange media, forces us to focus in that life being: we are forced to look at it, to what at it, without linking it to a specific environment. We can “dissect” or “paralyze” it to watch at it without producing any damage. In their natural environment they are fleeting and stand aloof and we have preconceived images of them; usually terrific and frightful. It is a way of de-contextualize for being able of assuming them. Repeated series bring us a vision in different times. In some cases there is a beginning and an end, in others it is cyclical. All of them embedded in a symmetrical format: similar to them and identical to the Nature itself. Also, serialization and repetition shelter a scientific sense, as it would be done during the collection of samples in a laboratory.

I would like to define what a digitogram is. It is, of course, an invented word, but it has its origin in the well-known early photographic process called the photogram. Based on the historical tradition of the photogram, I decided to take elements of the animal and vegetal kingdom as my starting point and place them on a device capable of registering images digitally: a flat scanner.

This device functions as the photosensitive element, which it truly is, because its CCD works as such. The image projected on it, after the device bounces light from the object placed on the glass, is captured and transformed into digital information capable of being manipulated and controlled using a computer.

Thus the name of the digitogram, which in other words stands for a digital photogram. In this way we do away with the optical and physical part of the camera and preserve what is most substantial: the object itself in direct and intimate contact with the surface of the sensitive paper. We therefore create a digital imprint in a unique and direct manner.

Scanner gives us a very special image. On one side very realistic, but at the same time, very contradictory. Apparently it is a photographic image, but then we discover it is not a traditional photography, at least the kind of photography we are used to. Discarding camera’s optical element give us a very particular perspective, that resembles more the traditional photogram and the photocopy than the optical image of the photography. Contradictions come together with elements foreign to photography, i.e. in scanner’s technological noises. For example, “ghosts” coming from scanning an object in movement, a non-conical perspective, a very short depth of field and a strange lighting. The fact that the image is generated from the slow movement of the scanner and not from a single shot and instantaneously as in a photo produces very singular effects.

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© 08-2011, Luis Castelo
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