It was something really top-notch and original, infused with creativity. And as always, Antonio Graell´s ability to gather a great number of people proved to be outstanding. There were even moments in which a lot of persons arrived literally by waves.

Phoptography has a built-in nobility, but I´m not referring to the very modern digital photography but to the "obsolete" chemical one, specifically the black and white photography, that technique whose process finishes on turning our negatives into positives, under the shelter of a subdued and protective red light, on baryta photographic papers, attaining their photosensitiveness thanks to the silver halides filling the emulsion covering them. And silver is one of the oldest known noble
metals. Just the opposite happens with digital sensors: the base of their manufacture is the silica, that´s to say, common sand, but besides, any of these sensors, by themselves, are useless objects compared to the autonomy sported by photographic chemical emulsions to capture and show any image. A digital sensor would be unable to work without elements as electricity, electronicas or
computer science, and even so, it requires a monitor in order that we can see its captures, while the silver halides making up the emulsion, with the simple action of the light, can get dark until exhibiting an almost absolute black going through all conceivable greys. Each one of those halides will be in conjunction with many others, responsible of an only image, and all of them, once they have been photicly aroused, will be definitive. Whether the outcome is valid or not, the created
image will remain immutable for ever.

That physical inability of the halides to undo their reactions contrasts with the manageability of the pixels when changing or break those changes and coming back to modify things once and again with a mere mouse click, a mutability becoming even bigger on a monitor pixels, that just acquire the luminosity and colour of the visualized archive. Those mutable pixels of the monitor, becoming
visible through the light generated thanks to the DSPs, software and electronics, are transferred to photographic paper during the fleeting instant in which both monitor and paper, are put in direct contact. When doing that, pixels are halidized and it ennobles a technology that, as it progresses and in spite of its increasingly versatility, keeps on turning colder, foreseeable and monotonous, because though it´s true that digital photography possibilities are infinite (and go on augmenting
every day), it isn´t less certain that many of those technological breakthroughs turn the photographic act and above all its subsequent manipulation into something so "simple" as pushing buttons and navigate through the menus and plugins of Photoshop and similar programs, to attain that our images have the same appearance that those watched browsing the web or the thousand ones
that have likewise copied their aspect.

Halidizing pixels is the definitive step through which digital photography is deconstructed. All that huge quantity of data created by the sensor, the processors and softwares are destroyed and transformed into another enormous amount of halides. But these halides are capricious. Their irregular shapes and chaotic distribution are absolutely contrary to the perfect array of those squared pixels. All that digital technology with which the process starts is just at the service of
its "old and noble" argentic predecessor. Photography retroevolves toward its origins in search of new ways of expression, being run hand-in-hand with the unpredictable, and whose end, however much you can travel the same way, won´t ever be exactly the same.

A good friend of mine, when I talked him about my project, told me that sometimes he has the impression that there´s a trend to look at the past bearing in mind the darkness of the future, but I don´t seek to gaze at the past, but rather try that past uses the present to light future.

This is the first stage of a project to deconstruct the digital photography, something that doesn´t mean to go against anything at all, but simply to fulfill a very interesting experience involving both the digital and analogue photography.

The idea of the deconstruction was born talking to some profession coleagues in METOL-4.
We spoke on how digital photography was putting aside the chemical one. The reasons for this situation are evident: to make digital pictures is cheap, comfortable, immediate, eliminates dependencies on third persons and last but not least, you can play with images as if they were a videogame. During the conversation it dawned on me that it was a very abstract idea, but, what would happen if I made a contact copy of the image projected by my monitor?

I realized soon that after that seemingly incoherent and experimental process there was a full scope world of creative possibilities, and above all, that we were before a way to bring nearer two visions on photography theoretically facing each other. It was about proving that both techniques - the chemical and the digital one- weren´t only able to cohabit, but also to be complementary in the development and implementation of new artistic processes.

My first concern was related to the technical problems, from how to "prepare" the archive in order that the images were up to my expectations, up to the way of exposing that photographic paper. Not in vain, both techniques boast great conceptual differences, ones due to the composition, making and working of their photosensitive components and other ones because of the way in which they´re processed and/or manipulated, albeit the pictured subject and the reason for which you photograph it are identical in both cases.

Within this first stage, the exhibited pictures are the result of copying the image shown on the monitor screen. An image which has previously been manipulated until achieving the creation of a "genuine" digital negative - to some extent substituting those glass plates used at dawn of photography- acting as an original from which making the positive copies. It´s an archive made up with pixels that on being transferred to paper, experience an inversion of their luminic values.
Thus, the pixels - conveyers of a great deal of information which isn´t usually visible for most of us- are "halidized" and "deconstructed" on the silvery photographic paper.

That info which few people are able to decipher isn´t but the hexadecimal code used by digital processors and programmes to "see the pictures". That seemingly unintelligible language is what contains all the image matadata, from the date and hour of creation, the camera model or the parameters of diaphragm and shutter speed to the complete background regarding how the quoted image has been altered, and of course, its size and format. And it all being expressed with
a myriad of digits, in a mathematically coherent succession from which I´ve chosen only a minute percentage accompanying each photograph, as an evidence of its existence, its handling and its deconstruction.