Lens Culture 2018 Art Photography Awards - Reviewer Feedback

Rachele Punturiero is a skilled photographer with a strong sense of being able to visually interpret what is happening around her. The way she composes her images creates a poetic experience for the viewer. It definitely appears she is working on making photos in a unique, artistic and painterly way. 

Punturiero’s portfolio is a study of time and motion. Using slow shutter speeds she takes advantage of motion blur to abstract images and evoke response in the viewer’s emotions. In her images are glimpses of identifiable details, co-mingling with monochromatic organic structures. 

Her work shows us the collisions of indistinct figures in space as we are unable to focus on any kind of defined structure. She puts the viewer in a dream-like world of compositions where abstract figures are juxtaposed against organic structures layered on top of one another in a way that compresses space and removes all context and sense of scale. The compositions become like another world where, in the series Soft, a human body merges with the environment and transform to become new organic structures.

On the surface Punturiero’s images have a type of visual complexity that concentrates on subtle tonality, patterns, lines, and the way the unidentifiable elements become ornaments in imaginary environments. She challenges the viewer to look deeply and consider the possibilities! She has captured patterns, textures, and organic shapes that produce “places” where it is impossible to judge the scale of forms, like in series’ Into the Water, La Belle Rose and I Will. In all the photos there is a kind of ambience that is quiet, mysterious, and full of drama. The images also function in a way that communicates her experience to the viewer. Anyone that is willing to set aside their compulsion to have to identify what they are looking at will relate to the feelings and emotions her images communicate.

Punturiero’s photos “blur” the line between photography and compositional, abstract design. These visual abstraction and colors are clearly important characters in her stories. She is asking that the viewer be sensitive enough to look deeply at her images, to see the details she has included in the frame and to consider “feeling” what they are seeing. 

There are strong visual threads that run through her portfolio and the first one is “color”. Her photography seeks to capture the magic that subtlety of color can communicate. The way she uses delicate colors speaks about the delicacy and fragility of structures as they rise out of chaos. She uses colour as a transformational, alchemical tool to transmute what she sees into what she would like others to see. Other threads are ghostly wisps of motion and visual textures. 

Another major thread is abstraction. Punturiero’s photos are deeply mysterious because they are so abstract. Because the subjects in her photos are not immediately identifiable, she captures images that go straight to the viewer’s imagination. For example, every photo is dramatic, rich with possibility and evoke feelings of curiosity. Her juxtaposition of visual elements makes the photos visually poetic. She asks the viewer to reason why certain abstract structures have been composed to form visual relationships with other abstract figures – much in the same way we might see in a dream. 

Punturiero’s images prove that if one has awareness and curiosity, they can discover new worlds among the mundane reality we live in.

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