DANIEL MUNTEANU
Transience impressionist photography project
Daniel Munteanu is a Romanian visual artist specializing in creative and impressionist photography. He believes that portraiture should not be confined to the boundaries of the real world. Exploiting the Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) technique and staged photography he gives life to fantasy characters that emerge from his dreams.
One of the defining features that turn conventional photography into a slice of reality is the sharpness of lines and details that give rise to an accurate representation of the photographed subject. Daniel wants to create something different, but sincerely straight out of the camera. Something that looks like fantasy but that is not a digital edition trick. The resulting imagery strives for the perfection and harmony of the lines painted with the digital sensor. He also wants to create a surreal palette, for which he uses special filters to obtain color sets without artificial digital processing. All of Daniel’s images are produced exclusively in camera, without any photo manipulation.
“Transience” is a long-term project (4 years+) that uses ICM to achieve true impressionist photography at a level seldom reached in the past. Here we take a view at two of the series in this project.
Daniel arrived at the Venice Carnival, fully aware of the challenges ahead. He tried to bring back some of the old carnival magic, which has been somehow lost due to popularization and the explosion of tourism. With his techniques, the flashy or sometimes cheap adornments on some of the costumes become fuzzy, and light glitters turn into bright trails. Photographing with ICM gives rise to a world that can be even more beautiful than reality, which was Daniel’s goal.
Daniel has developed a procedure for catching light on a chosen special material in such a way that it resembles light particles in motion. Thus, he can combine two simultaneous motions, those of the camera and the moving character. The results range from very abstract to “light sculptures”, from which a face can occasionally peer through streaks of light. By using different motions and poses, he tries to give a dynamic feel to the images and to freeze the movement in time. The images seem to depict spirits made of light, as if transported to this plane of existence from another world, a world with less gravity and almost no solidity.
