STREET VIEW

 

We live within a dense and constantly shifting flow of communication circulating between physical reality and the digital sphere – between the gaze and the smartphone. It is a condition that can neither be resisted nor contained. Yet perhaps this flow can be shaped through small oases of reflection, and through images that need not be “beautiful”, but engaging, layered and shareable. Seppi’s work departs from a lucid premise: increasingly, we live what we see, as our eyes coincide more and more with the lenses of the smartphones that we carry at all times. To photograph a journey — even casually — means to preserve places in memory, fragmenting not only geography but temporality itself. Images continuously overlap, chase one another and settle within recollection, yet Seppi anticipates this process, constructing a series of deliberate visual correspondences and carefully calibrated juxtapositions. Working entirely through the technology of the mobile phone, he produces image files that, once printed, become traces of the journey itself. In this transition, the photographs lose any sense of accidentality: they are unmistakably images by Erwin Seppi, and their “street view” is precisely what we see — nothing more, nothing less. They evoke the “superimpositions” of Boris Michajlov, the great Ukrainian photographer. Yet whereas Michajlov works through the archive, Seppi’s iconographic material emerges directly from the street itself: from fleeting encounters, urban trajectories and the contingency of everyday life.

Seppi repeatedly introduces female faces extracted from advertisements, billboards and commercial imagery embedded within the urban fabric. These faces function as a kind of frame through which the city’s visual fragments unfold. Like a watermark slowly surfacing, the photographer allows the female face to emerge as though it were the true focus of his investigation — a latent image gradually coming into view. At times, it takes on the character of an unconscious and almost surreal projection linking the different image layers together.

What emerges is a new reality: one consciously constructed, determined and orchestrated by the photographer. The works before us originate in the accumulation of images stored within our smartphones — dense visual sediments gathered within digital memory. The artist extracts these fragments and translates them into prints. The street-level gaze remains the structuring principle throughout: it articulates trajectories, affinities and visual correspondences. Everything appears unexpectedly renewed — open to new meanings, new readings and new ways of seeing.

 

Valerio Dehò, curator and art critic