Duncan passed away last June at the age of 102 and was one of Life magazine's top photographers in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs. Then he had begun to look for new photographic languages, a new line of his. One day he decided to go to southern France and here he met Pablo Picasso and made a friendship that was destined to last for a long time.
Picasso never hid his skepticism towards photography and said "The difficulty lies here" pointing at the camera lens. While Duncan replied “it's true, even the object transmitted through the lens ends up dominating the photographer. He can only partially manipulate this reality. He can fade it, filter it, increase the exposure time, correct it during development and printing. But the painter is more free. Human ingenuity plays a wider role in painting”.
However, Ducan understood that more brains had to be given to the camera and it was during a visit to the Photokina exhibition in Cologne in 1962 that he found what he was looking for. It was a prism that gave special effects, designed by a Berlin firm for film cameras. He spoke with the company's technicians, then spent an entire week in the factory personally supervising the preparation of 17 prisms and lenses, with the relative devices necessary to insert them in his normal 35mm camera.
The lenses have shapes and patterns etched into the optical glass they are made of. Used together with prisms, they can decompose the relative and recompose the fragments in a completely different order, just like a painter could do.
Until 1972, the Whitney Museum of America Art in New York had never exhibited photography, but this same year it decided to dedicate an entire floor to Duncan's solo exhibition. Among the works on display, 7 in color with the prismatic technique, another 12 extraordinarily realistic images that the same photographer had taken in Vietnam and Korea stood out.
The book was published in Italy, with the title Prismatic - Discovering an unknown Paris - Fratelli Fabbri Editori [1973].
And this is how Paris appears to us transformed by Duncan into an image as a link between reality and abstraction. A story already written that reveals itself by pointing to the lost road that is reunited.
