“Commercials have a dominant place in the public space. Day and night slogans lit our streets and lightboxes forces images upon us. Our daily surrounding is saturated of messages, of meaning. Photography has an important role to play in this. The photographic image is often an image that overflows with meaning. The reality pales in comparison with this image. It becomes implausible.
Light gets absorbed in photography and by doing so gives a chemical reaction. I use this principle in UN-TITLED to absorb the commercial lighting. By doing so, I destroy the message. A blank space appears which the viewers can fill in themselves. For me photography is not a way to overload images with meaning. In contrary, in UN-TITLED I want to photograph the image ‘empty’. This allows me to research how light can be used in different ways as a source of communication. I shine my light on the identity of the photographic image in our current mass image culture.” – Bastiaan Vanaarle.
