October 31, 1693. A tribute
Arturo StanigA tribute to the culture and the people of Newark, New Jersey.
October 31, 1693. A Tribute was shot on the sets of a number of music video clips for Hip Hop artists of the Newark, New Jersey music scene. I was invited by the producer and the director to document and express my take on the mise en scène. The project explores the cityscapes of working class areas and downtown architecture, leveraging on human as well as abstract compositions. The hard lines of modern structures complement the ever changing yet ancient discourse of the human landscape. In an attempt to draw the audience to familiarize with an otherwise glossed over area of New Jersey, I avoid exploiting camera artifice, delivering a verist outlook on the scenes and appreciating the visual inputs offered by mundane settings.
Shot in a pre-pandemic, Black Lives Matter and 2020 election madness context, the images are presented by leaving the backstories of the individuals and of the places to be deciphered between the lines, emphasizing the visual experimentation nature of the project.
In general about my work, my images mix abstraction and documentarian realism. The synthesis of photographic genres comes through as associations of visual perceptions: a hermetic voyage through landscapes, concept and portraits as states of mind. I create images by rendering shapes, lines and textures in a stylized way, emphasising the two dimensional nature of the photographic medium.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
also check out Hanging with Jay