New Strategies | Cubist Realities

The digital allows a reader to access other perspectives that can both amplify and contradict what one is first shown. This can be done as well with diptychs and triptychs displayed side by side; the rollover allows each image to exist independently of the other, the links to be made in the reader’s mind.  

Tourists usually view only a façade that excludes the lives of the people who live and work in a place. Here the reader can roll over each image and find out more about what lies behind, making photography more Cubist with an expectation of multiple, perhaps even contradictory perspectives.

Gloucester, Massachusetts, a magnet for tourists as well as a full-time fishing village, is shown so that by placing the cursor on Nubar Alexanian’s photographs of the beautiful landscapes one can find a second layer revealing the workaday lives of those for whom it is home — a giant fish eye, fishermen, local children, an aspect of their religious life.

Similarly, the Eiffel Tower can be shown with a portrait of some of those who maintain it underneath, or a worker can be shown in his or her apartment with a photograph of their place of employment that becomes visible in a rollover. There are myriad ways to acknowledge complexity that are not readily available in analog photography.

As of now, these possibilities are rarely utilized.