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IN THE 50 YEARS, PHOTOGRAPHY WAS A NARRATIVE ELEMENT OF THE BLACK FILM

This is a photography exhibition, but I want to start talking about cinema;

more specifically of black cinema,

and I'm going to do it by quoting the director Paul Schrader in an interview he said:

"reduce black cinema to its primary colors (all shades of black), those cultural and stylistic elements to which all definition must go".

With this introduction, I present La Jungla de Asfalto, a project that pays homage to the film genre known as film noir or black film, which was developed mainly in the United States between the 1930s and 1960s. An eclectic genre that aesthetically drinks from diverse sources, from the Chinese shadows, the tenebrism of Baroque painting with its chiaroscuros, the German expressionism in the cinematographic, the French poetic realism and even the Italian neorealism and, of course, the work of the German directors who would soon emigrate to the United States ( Fried Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, ...) that extrapolate to the America of the 30s and 40s the problematic and aesthetic of the Germany of the 20s.

The light in the black cinema becomes one of the main protagonists and is an important part of the narrative.

With the aesthetic basis of black cinema, my project aims to humbly represent the atmosphere of those old films that have influenced me so much.

The photographs of this series have been taken from 2003 to 2017, both in major European cities such as Berlin, Oporto, Brussels or Madrid, as well as in other Spanish cities such as Zamora, Oviedo, Murcia, Granada, Cartagena or Cuenca, as well as small cities such as Ceutí or Mula.

What unites them all is that they let themselves be led, in one way or another, by the influence of the film noir, by its characters, its dress, its aesthetics, its atmosphere or its light.

As a final detail and as a nod to my beloved film noir, each of the photos bears the title of one of her great films, because she reminded me of her for a frame, for a hat or simply for the smoke of a cigarette.

Andrés García Mellado

-Photographer-

Source: Agencias