I'd always wish that I was in their shoes and be able to perform amazing feats of wizardry.Īs the years went I kept my casual fandom to myself and only let a few of my friends know. I always felt like they were the more interesting ones who, in some cases, kept their magic a secret. I always loved the characters that had special abilities and kept it a secret. Although in Snap Fingers and Whistle de Middel’s blurring of the boundaries between the real and the staged is often opaque, it reveals an interest that is common to her work as a whole: conflating truth and fiction to offer insight into an aspect of the human condition, in this case the hopes and ideals associated with the American Dream.įurther reading Cristina De Middel: SPBH Book Club Vol III, 2013,, accessed September 2014.Įmma Lewis September 2014, updated by Sarah Allen, June 2017ĭoes this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.Growing up as a kid I was a huge fan of Harry Potter, Lord of The Rings, King Arthur and really any kinds of stories that revolved around magic. Throughout her career de Middel has taken the distinct form, content, and technique usually associated with either fiction or the document and used them in a careful, often deliberately obtuse, way in order to tell a story while also challenging preconceptions we might hold about the veracity of the photographic image. Snap Fingers and Whistle, of all de Middel’s series to date, bears the most obvious relationship to her previous career as a newspaper photographer. This is emphasised in her use of the sequence, in the style of magazine photo-essays or photo-stories from the mid-century, and also in her decision to take the city streets, and people she encountered on them, as her subject matter. In Snap Fingers and Whistle de Middel’s use of staging is less overt than in her earlier series, such as Polyspam 2009 (Tate P20839– P20846) and The Afronauts 2012 (Tate P82235– P82271), and the relationship to ‘straight’ documentary is more well-defined. (Unpublished artist’s statement for Tate, 2013.) I was looking for that real part in the movies, if any, exploring again the fluid border between fact and fiction through the very respectable street photography … Following the script of West Side Story, this series stands as a reflection on the basis of street photography and its relation to truth, restoring the icons on my ideas built an image of the city that never sleeps. I decided to document New York just according to what I expected from these over-reported streets. Describing Snap Fingers and Whistle, de Middel has spoken of the relationship between popular culture and reportage in the work: By using formal devices associated with the former – printing the photographs to look like film stills and displaying them as a sequence, for example – de Middel emphasises the cinematic and atmospheric qualities of this work, and evokes the New York of popular imagination. The place that de Middel presents in Snap Fingers and Whistle feels familiar, not only because of any personal experience the viewer might have of New York but because of how the city is experienced through film and music. The series exists in an edition of five, of which Tate’s copy is number one. A rainbow-coloured vinyl decal can be placed at the top-left of the grid, behind the first image in the sequence, to give the effect of a beginning of a cinema movie. The images are displayed all together installed in a grid, following layouts provided by the artist. In some cases this was orchestrated at the time of shooting, by de Middel asking strangers to recreate a choreographed move from West Side Story in others the intervention took place during post-processing, with de Middel digitally manipulating the image to obvious and surreal ends, removing a skateboard from a skateboarder, for example, so that he appears to float in mid-air. Featuring cars, passers-by and urban signage, the images in Snap Fingers and Whistle possess a fleeting look in the manner of traditional street photography, yet they are, to varying degrees, the result of careful construction or manipulation by the artist. The title is a reference to the finger snapping and whistles which characterised some of the musical numbers in West Side Story, the American musical written in 1961 about the rivalry between two teenage gangs on New York City’s Upper West Side in the 1950s. Snap Fingers and Whistle 2013 is a series of twenty-eight square-format colour photographs of scenes of New York.
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