Guido Mocafico Livres

Photographe et amateur d'art, l'auteur porte un regard d'artiste sur les serpents, offrant une vision mystérieuse du reptile à travers ses photographies. Les oeuvres sont suivies des légendes sur les différentes espèces présentées.

In Greek mythology, the Medusa sees with such intensity that whatever crosses her gaze becomes her eye functions much like that of the photographer. The photographs in Guido Mocafico's Medusa arrest a species beyond the where is the head? where are the eyes? the sex? His subjects are jellyfish, and as a photographer working in the vocabulary and the colors of nature, Mocafico regards them as the creation of an unparalleled artist. His images of them fall at the border of geometric abstraction, violently disconnected from the rest of the animal world, and they combine a vision of the unknown with a large dose of mystery and of fear, as these translucent creatures secrete a toxic substance that can, in certain cases, cause death. With just the right amount of distance, Mocafico offers a contemporary view of the demiurge, showing us that we live in a world of illusion. Medusa, originally only bound as part of the limited edition boxed set Venenum, is here available for the first time on its own.

It has long been Guido Mocafico?s dream to photograph the masterpiece glass models of marine invertebrates and plants that took Leopold (1822?95) and his son Rudolf (1857?1939) Blaschka a lifetime to create. This book fulfills that dream and showcases the Blaschkas? unparalleled dedication to their craft. Originally from Bohemia but based in Dresden, the Blaschkas worked from the mid-1800s until the 1930s. From clear, colored and painted glass they handmade their intricate models of invertebrate animals (including jellyfish, sea anemones, starfish and sea cucumbers) as well as plants, only on commission and for purposes of study, mainly in Europe and North America. The objects were not sold to the general public and are today held in museum collections including those of Harvard University, the Corning Museum of Glass/Cornell University, and the Natural History Museums in London and Dublin.0It has been a difficult process for Mocafico to gain authorization to photograph the Blaschkas? creations, as most museums do not display these extremely fragile models. Yet Mocafico pursued the largest Blaschka collections throughout Europe and eventually gained access to photograph their hidden treasures in his trademark style. The result is similar to that of his 'Nature Morte' series in that we constantly question what we see: a photograph, a painting, the object itself or a product of our imagination?

In 1999, pioneering fashion editor and stylist Babeth Djian founded Numéro, the now famous Paris magazine with an unmistakable aesthetic that boldly combines fashion with contemporary art. Guido Mocafico has photographed provocative still-lifes for Numéro since its first issue, and this comprehensive six-volume publication contains all this work to date. Every month Babeth gives Mocafico carte blanche for the closing pages of Numéro, a rare privilege in today’s advertising-driven fashion magazines. In response he creates radical still-lifes (of objects including perfume bottles, shoes, watches and jewelry) that incorporate the genres of architecture, landscape and nude photography, and make comparable work in other magazines look like uninspired product shots. The experimental forum offered to Mocafico by Numéro facilitates his maverick, sometimes critical view of contemporary vanity, and has given birth to some of his larger influential series including “Medusa,” “Movement,” “Serpens” and “Stilleven.”

“The day someone looking at my pictures asked me why I had photographed paintings, I knew my goal – illusion – had been achieved.” Guido Mocafico Stilleven is Guido Mocafico’s interpretation of the great Dutch and German still-life paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By painstakingly reconstructing banquet and floral scenes as well as vanitas still-lifes by artists including Floris van Dijck and Pieter Claesz, Mocafico not only copies these paintings but brings them back to life. Using a large-format analogue camera with colour transparencies, Mocafico creates brilliant images with the highest degree of verisimilitude. Mocafico’s triumph, however, is not only recreating the appearance of things, but his restaging of the devout, mystical atmosphere of these paintings.