Born as a mean to describe the reality trapping it into the small space and time dimension of here and now, photography has soon revealed much wider potentialities including the one related to representing itself. To do it, it has to confront itself with light: you do not only have to recognize it as a constituent element, taken into consideration that it is already in its name , instead, you need to face it as a subject and realising, in this way, that photography is also an introspective mirror of our personal vision of life and reality. “The more I was going on with my project – says the American photographer George A. Tice – the more it became obvious to me that the place I went shooting pictures was completely irrelevant. This particular place offered me just an excuse. You can only see what you are ready to see, what your brain reflects in that precise moment”. No better words than these could be found to introduce this research in which Lia Stein creates an unusual path to lead the observer to an intense complicity without which he would not appreciate it as he should. The elements she uses are a few essential ones because she only needs a scattered dim-light in an empty space to discover a new dimension able to raise a great interest, the one originated by inventiveness. There are images where – a door jamb, the shape of a table - are only sketched permitting the observer’s brain to transform the details into a recognisable collection. The absolute dominion of white which involves all the scene, obliges the observer’s look to follow the geometrical shapes of this artistic composition imagining that the range shades metaphorically corresponds to the one of feelings and emotions. In contrast with an author such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, who uses very long timings to trap a lot of images in one dim light which overlap to eventually abolish in the light, Lia, instead, prefers the lightness of a quick touch by which she catches unusual aspects of reality. Sometimes she puts herself in a frontal positioning that evokes the suspended atmospheres of a contemporary theatricity:in that
empty room defined by a floor-stage it seems to hear the echo of the words of waiting that Godot screamed or the words that Winnie dedicated to his happy days. For sure, photos are dumb but the continuous changes of prospective through which Lia Stein characterises her research, gets really close to the theme changes typical of music and words. The pursuit of details and the totality of , black and white, empty and full, aren’t random at all. In fact they evoke the tonal range of words when they want to describe a feeling of rising intensity going from sympathy to interest, from familiarity to love, from care to tenderness, from addiction to friendship, from accord to attraction , from love to passion. In this way light stings the space and it suddenly appears from above , it lights itself up as if it wanted to cut obliquely the volume of a building, it indicates something behind the lighted windows on the dark wall, it lays down on the wrinkles of a parade of shirts which elevates itself as in a mysterious installation that maybe can talk about human condition between the brightness of fabric and the dark of their shadows. (Roberto Mutti)
