Busacca Gallery

Nature's reflections Nature's reflections is a series of photographs that Leandro Sanchez captured in the vast California desert. This series is the result of hours of scouting locations, angles, and dusty cactus-filled deserts, waiting for the right timing and wishing for light to be at its best. Waiting at times ankle-deep in salty mud to try and capture that perfect moment of light and reflection that nature might provide, some days are futile some are stunningly fruitful. In this series Leandro patiently held out for perfect times of the day, when the light is in balance with the reflection in the water - not a single cloud in the air - which creates in these angles even more depth and infinity. Creating infinity in a visual is something that Leandro strives for, it gives the photograph a powerful tone of vastness. To capture many of these visuals, Leandro goes very deep into nature, sometimes so deep that even a 4x4 gets stuck in dirt roads that are so rarely navigated that their structure is extremely poor. He searches for that connection between solitude and nature, which brings a great abundance of inspiration, when nothing else but nature is present. The combination of all of these elements - solitude, vastness, uncertainty and patience - gives at times a great payoff, visuals that take many days to capture and create. Back in his studio in Manhattan, Leandro decided to elaborate even more on these images to make the reflection appear more vibrant. He discovered after hours of post that indeed seeing them in a very different angle provided even more power to the visual, the impact becomes stronger for some reason - sky becomes earth and earth becomes sky - hence this series has angles that are unusual but deliver an accentuated beauty to nature's stunning majesty. What Leandro admires most about nature is that one visual can be taken seconds later from another and yet be so vastly different - the temperature, the angle of light, the season, the moisture can all make very different visuals that might never repeat again - the capturing of a particular moment in time that embodies a balance between technique, artistry and luck. bio The photographic eye of Leandro Sanchez, award winning photographer (artslant showcase 2010) has been influenced greatly by his diverse upbringing on three continents, which helped formulate his unique outlook on life as witness to 3 world cultures as well their as rich natural landscapes. Background: Leandro was born in Venezuela at the entry of the 1970's. The grandson of a known Venezuelan political figure of the 1950's and 1960's who fought against the dictatorship and established democracy in the country, Leandro's mother's family was extradited to Cuba and then the USA/NYC as a child until her family was allowed to return to Venezuela after the dictatorship toppled. There she met Leandro's father, a chemical engineer, whose roots include a proud association to his indigenous Guajiro Indian heritage. Hence Leandro was soaking in differing political ideologies even as he was learning to speak... Leandro moved with his family to Paris as a child while his parents attended graduate school in France, living mere blocks from the visual feast of Luxembourg garden. In Paris Leandro was immersed in French culture, civilization and language for nearly 4 years until he moved back to Venezuela at age 8. Leandro's privileged life in Venezuela as a youth in private schools and as a culture- sponge teenager allowed him frequent trips to the USA where he learned English with his Miami cousins and where Leandro also developed a lifelong passion for New York City, his eventual home. This diverse, tri-continent lifestyle began to drive Leandro toward the questioning mind, discerning eye and his adventurous spirit that is at the core of his work. Though he came from a fortunate lifestyle, Leandro never bought into the elite mentality that prevailed in his class and time, this rather has made him battle the obvious disparities that exist in Latin American society between rich and poor. Leandro left Venezula at 18 to return to Paris to attend University (La Sorbonne, "Cours de langue et Civilization Francaise") where he began his adult visual artistic journey - Leandro attended film school ( E.I.C.A.R) and soon began working as a scout for film and commercials in his early 20's. Leandro would head off alone from Paris, armed only with a camera and a notepad, visually scouring France, Spain, and beyond for the best scenic locations, which helped enormously to guide his knowledge and taste for seeking out perfect light, for finding the beautiful and the unique in both nature and in civilization. It didn't take long for Leandro's keen eye and filmic sensibilities to catapult him into the director's chair, and in his 20's Leandro began his career as a professional Director of Commercials in Paris. By 28, Leandro moved across the Atlantic to find his intellectual mate: New York City, where all cultures collide and meld in modern balance. In Manhattan, Leandro spent his free time photographing and painting when he wasn't directing commercials on locations around the globe. Leandro was introduced to his visual spiritual mate when his wife (then his girlfriend) showed Leandro the splendor of the vast North American deserts on his birthday in 2000 while on a trip to California - even though Leandro didn't turn his professional aim fully toward photography for another 10 years, Leandro had met one of his strongest visual muses in the stark beauty of the West's deserts, and he couldn't help but aim his lens on the vast canvas of nature there. Also along this visual trail, Leandro turned his aim toward painting, and his indigenous- inspired murals earned gallery exhibitions in NYC (TriBeCa and elsewhere in Manhattan), plus a duo show in the Miami design district participating at the Basel Art Fair in the 2005. Now Leandro's gallery showings in New York and London are featuring his unique visual photographic works (T.O.A.S.T in NYC, London's St.Bride Foundation Bridewell Theater). His photography continues to gain accolades as Leandro's work is featured not only in galleries but also in print, digital magazines, photography sites, art critics' picks and most recently the photo essay magazine LIFE Force UK, which only grabs monthly some of the top photo essays and photojournalism made around the globe. Leandro was chosen in July 2011 to participate with his photo essay of RAMONA GARDENS, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the globe. Leandro's visual photo reportage grasped the very core of the off-limits gang culture. Whether Leandro's photographic series are portraying stark nature, social portraits, mythical creatures, cityscapes or enigmatic light/strobe painting, Leandro's visual complexity and diverse background are stunningly apparent - his rich cultural mesh continues to influence his art expansively, in his fight to show how when all forces unite, the certain result becomes pure beauty. LINKS to selected press: http://repertoriumfilms.prosite.com/1151/selected-press LINKS to selected exhibits: http://repertoriumfilms.prosite.com/2030/selected-exhibits

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photos

Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would see. The process of creating photographs is called photography. (Photo) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light". The first permanent photograph was made in 1825 by a French inventor, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, building on a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz (1724): that a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. Niépce and Louis Daguerre refined this process. Daguerre discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine vapor, before exposure to light, and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken, could form a latent image; bathing the plate in a salt bath then fixes the image. These ideas led to the famous daguerreotype. The daguerreotype had its problems, notably the fragility of the resulting picture, and that it was a positive-only process and thus could not be re-printed. Inventors set about looking for improved processes that would be more practical. Several processes were introduced and used for a short time between Niépce's first image and the introduction of the collodion process in 1848. Collodion-based wet-glass plate negatives with prints made on albumen paper remained the preferred photographic method for some time, even after the introduction of the even more practical gelatin process in 1871. Adaptations of the gelatin process have remained the primary black-and-white photographic process to this day, differing primarily in the film material itself, originally glass and then a variety of flexible films. Color photography is almost as old as black-and-white, with early experiments dating to John Herschel's experiments with Anthotype from 1842, and Lippmann plate from 1891. Color photography became much more popular with the introduction of Autochrome Lumière in 1903, which was replaced by Kodachrome, Ilfochrome and similar processes. For many years these processes were used almost exclusively for transparencies (in slide projectors and similar devices), but color prints became popular with the introduction of the Chromogenic negative, which is the most-used system in the C-41 process. The needs of the movie industry have also introduced a host of special-purpose systems, perhaps the most well known being the now-rare Technicolor.