Upwards

In The Gray Rye, everything happens in the urban space. The series was created as a way to register the day to day circulation of the artist Natália Tonda. She aimed to shed new light on daily life elements as well as places where she would normally pass through. Acting as a foreigner in her hometown, São Paulo, Tonda reinvents routes and experiments on ways of looking at what used to be unobserved. Always in black and white and taken with the cellphone, her photos are part of exercises on observation and framing. In her images, the incidental does not draw a line without being transformed into an attitude. 

When capturing these images, she modifies systematic elements of the public space such as light posts, electricity columns, satellite antennas, and security cameras. In her photos, a circular passage can become a vortex that carries us towards background buildings. The urban infrastructure is seen with its verticals, diagonals, forms, and variable angles with elements able to conduct our look, as signs that guide us. The artist reinvents the existence of these objects as they are transformed into interesting and compelling elements for exciting compositions. An antenna can be a light source; a car surface can be a mirror; a rearview mirror can be a frame for three nuns walking together on the street. 

Nevertheless, the images are not concerned with those objects, buildings, or people. The street is merely a stage as what truly concerns Tonda is the way we look at them. Not coincidentally, the artist looks up and takes us along in her discovery of a new horizon. In our daily commute, we look forward or down at most. Her attitude is like a deviation from the previously outlined route, an escape from contemplative views, which can transform high voltage power lines in abstract visual constructions. This is how the photographer also takes the sky out of the background and turns it into the primary space, creating images that make us think of Alfred Stieglitz’ series Equivalents. 

The Gray Rye inspires while also catches us as we need to look attentively to each photograph. Although they might create a quick impression, we are led to contemplate and unveil all the layers constituting the images. There are multiple elements, lines of composition, and textures created by the grains that are overlapped and intertwined. By choosing the term “rye” for the title, a suggestion is made: a lot is indicated, however, little is claimed, and that Tonda’s regard is always curious and attentive, but, at the same time, it remains open to the imagination and transformation of what is seen. 

Always looking upwards as looking ahead is too ordinary. 

* To see the series, visit www.photonaty.carbonmade.com.