Featured Photographer: Luca Tombolini - "Vistas Paradossales”
This feature by Michael Behlen was originally published in Edition 2 of Analog Forever Magazine, Winter 2020.
Is it possible to be a photographer and philosopher? If you are just now seeing the work of Milanese visual artist Luca Tombolini, you would now know that the answer is yes. Taking cues from German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Luca’s series Vistas articulately speaks the words that our native tongues have difficulty expressing in ways that explore the factual yet incredibly mysterious nature of our universe. In Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism, he argued that space, time, and causation are mere sensibilities; “things-in-themselves” exist, but their nature is unknowable. He famously stated that “Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.”
Starting from Kant’s idea, Luca’s work artistically seeks a way out to those boundaries by exploring the scientific ideas of Space, Time, and Relativity by asking viewers to consider the perception of their place in the universe via the combination of long and multiple exposure landscapes and cameraless micro-scapes made of color drops in solvents. His viewpoints on these topics are as unique as his imagery. He shared with us that “As we’re born it seems to us perfectly logical that all that exists can be found within the realm of our consciousness. But that’s not correct: our senses evolved to help humans cope with reality and to survive and obtain our daily needs. We are adapted to it but at the same time that’s the cage because of which we are unable to perceive the most of what’s going on around us.”
His other-worldly imagery points to the existence of a universal constant that pervades the universe. This constant could be just out of our grasp to our consciousness due to the limited spectrum of reality that our senses had evolved to perceive. Luca further explains, “Our ears can only pick up frequencies between a certain amount of hertz. The light that excites the human visual system is a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, they are the same frequencies that are emitted by the sun because we evolved with it. The way we function is based upon the rhythm of our planet. We are perfectly in rhythm with the length of the day and night in our activities and restfulness. We feel Time as we feel it because we live on Earth; if we paradoxically evolved on Mars our biorhythm would have set at a slower pace as one year on Mars is 687 days. We live in a bubble of relativity connected to how fast Earth is moving.”
Luca has spent hours contemplating these ideas from behind his 4x5” field camera. Using 4x5 color negative film, his series Vistas combines very long and multiple exposures of landscapes that aim to hide the recognizability of the precise moment they were taken; transporting us into an altered time dimension of far off primordial lands. In contrast, he pairs mixed media micro- landscapes created in the darkroom that produce abstract creations that hint at the worlds we are able to create with our own intuition. The resulting images suggest that the nature of what our brain feels as the flowing of Time and the extension Space are more likely to be different entities that don’t share the same qualities that we naturally perceive, and of which we cannot get to understanding yet. They make us wonder what the constant is that pervades the Universe; the principle because of which everything can exist.
That constant is the same something that is within Luca, within us, and within galaxies forming light-years away. As humans, we have given this concept numerous descriptions, from the scientific “Energy” to the spiritual “God”. It appears to Luca that “Every mind that has set out on any sort of investigation of these principles has had to describe and imagine it using the toolkit he had available into his imagination. Nevertheless, there is unity and ubiquity in that thing because all that exists does live and nurture on it.” His in-camera composites echo his sentiments of the inconceivable truths by displaying sunsets, sunrises, and the whole of the night within a single frame that reveals light gradients that don’t exist within conscious perception. Throughout his series, the celestial bodies of the sun and moon are juxtaposed onto the opposite times of the day that disrupt our normal perception that what we see is the only reality. His landscapes are a mirror to humanity’s unconsciousness. Via his images, we are able to travel into, live in, and contemplate these remote places that deny the self ’s superstructure and presents the viewer with the question of his own existence.
Overall, Luca’s work is an extraordinary dive into questions as old as time. Though he isn’t discovering new scientific frontiers with his work, he is bringing these important and meditative questions to the forefront of our minds in times that are saturated with materialism. And though he is exploring these questions with the very material things that stop us from seeing beyond them, there is a spiritual connection and a motivation that pushes us to peak outside the first pieces of evidence presented to us in reality and open our minds to the treasures that we hold in our unconscious.
GALLERY
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Luca Tombolini was born in 1979 in Milan. He completed humanistic studies and after that a degree in Sciences of Communication, with a major on rhetoric patterns in Cinema. While studying at university in 2011 he discovered large format photography and started experimenting. He began his artistic career photographing desert landscapes during long solo adventures to some of the most untouched and desolate places on earth, often for weeks at a time. His expeditions are fueled by an unconscious desire that he theorizes as a need to capture a glimpse of a transcendent absolute. His work has been exhibited in group shows throughout the world since 2014, including Affordable Art Fairs in Hong Kong and Vancouver, Galleria Ceribelli in Bergamo, Italy, and the Paris Library of Arts. His work was most recently published online on It’s Nice That in February 2018, on Der Grief in January 2016 and Aint-Bad Magazine in March 2015. He's a reader of C.G. Jung and Buddhist teachings.
Connect with Luca Tombolini on his Website and on Instagram!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Behlen is an instant film addict and the founder and publisher of Analog Forever Magazine. For the last six years, Behlen has become an obsessive community organizer in the film photography world, including previously launching the independent publishing projects PRYME Magazine and PRYME Editions, two enterprises dedicated to the art of instant film. Through these endeavors, he has featured and published 250+ artists from around the globe via his print and online publications.
He has self-published two Polaroid photobooks -“Searching for Stillness, Vol. 1” and “I Was a Pioneer,” literally a boxed set of his instant film work. His latest book, Searching for Stillness Vol II was published in 2020 by Static Age. He has been published, been interviewed, and been reviewed in a quantity of magazines and online publications, from F-Stop and Blur Magazine to the Analog Talk Podcast. He loves the magic sensuality of instant film: its saturated, surreal colors; the unpredictability of the medium; its addictive qualities as you watch it develop. He spends his time shooting instant film and backpacking in the California wilderness, usually a combination of the two.
Connect with Michael Behlen on his Website and on Instagram!