From the city of Gaborone comes a new photographic body of work by Botswanan artist Giancarlo LaGuerta. With no formal arts education, he developed and nurtured his own technical and art propensity and today works as both photographer and art director.
Speaking to me about the creative dynamics of his city, he informed me that the art community and culture still needs an element that can animate and excite creatives. “The scene here doesn’t inspire one to be better or push the envelope; the need to do that comes from within”.
Despite a knack to internalize stimuli, Giancarlo feels that living in a developing country is its own source of influence. “Things are not very refined around here and there’s something beautiful about that.”
Giancarlo’s series ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ is held captive by its creator by his persistence of not wanting to prescribe a defined meaning to the work he has brought to the public eye. He finds his motive for creating this set of images that depict two brothers, twins, in the close-natured-ness of brotherhood.
“I’ve always loved making something from nothing; for as long as I can remember. I learnt how to draw before I learnt how to read and write.” Images with deep contrast and hard lighting meet a focus that sometimes make background elements seem distorted. Among the choice of such defining lighting a lot of post work comes to play and the viewer is confronted with images that carry a DIY sensibility (created by a collage element) meets VHS tape visual appearance. “I treat my work like a puzzle. I combine different elements and styles to achieve a good product and complete the picture, so to speak.”
The choice of reproducing older stylizations digitally is justified by Giancarlo as a way of making his work seem less pop and more distant and substantial. With a hope of bringing across a documentary take on his models.
Relying mostly on natural lighting, the subjects of his images being brothers and twins and the natural settings that the series depicts are the only real life/documentary elements that are present. The combination of mimicking various forms of older image creation leans itself towards excessiveness and does not label a body of work as more, or less substantial.
Although the work is visually striking, the artist’s unwillingness to come forth with a statement can be seen as an open invite for the viewers’ interpretation or simply the idea that these are just a set of artistically crafted images. Not achieving a documentary feel makes these images to appear more fashion oriented as documentary images allows no retouching or altering of photographic material.
Credits:
Stylist – Eva Maria Fernanda LaGuerta
