Maria Finitzo

The American photographer, Walker Evans called photographs transcendent documents. He believed that a photograph could possess specific content that captured a moment in time with cultural resonance and at the same time, transcended all of that to evoke a state of mind. Alfred Stieglitz used the word equivalents as the title of a group of images he made of clouds, seeing them as equivalents of psychological or emotional states. In literature, it’s called the objective correlative, a phrase coined by T.S. Elliott as the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art by identifying objects, a situation, a chain of events that evoke a ‘particular emotion’. Or to put it another way, the gap between saying an emotion and expressing one, is the objective correlative.

I have been a story teller my entire professional life. First as a filmmaker, using the language of cinema, and now as a photographer and writer. In my work as a photographer, I am deeply interested in making photographs that transcend the specific content of my image. Borrowing from the tools of a writer, I strive to make photographs that are metaphorically resonant. What are the hidden meanings found in the physical beauty of a landscape?  How does a human body become more than a form in space? The power of images resides in the deeper meaning that is evoked.