RGBefore aims to use an early photographic process to establish a starting point for an artistic exploration of contemporary issues. The focus is on three-colour photography, which marked a decisive moment in the history of photographic perception at the end of the 19th century: colour was no longer merely imagined or added retrospectively, but could be experienced as a technically produced dimension of photographic reality. What was once regarded as a complex innovation has now become virtually invisible in the digital image, because it has long since become an integral part of it.
RGBefore
describes the moment
just before an image is created.
RGBefore invites us to re-examine a historical principle of image-making and to transpose it into the present as an artistic practice. At a time when images are produced, disseminated and consumed in vast numbers, the focus turns to the very conditions of photography itself: to the relationship between technology and perception, between decomposition and synthesis, and between documentation and construction.
A new image is to be created from three individual photographs in the colours red, green and blue. The process of trichromatic photography should not be understood merely as a reconstruction of a historical technique, but as an artistic method through which the materiality, temporality and constructed nature of the photographic image can be made visible. The resulting composite thus always invites reflection on the image as a cultural form: on its history, its technical prerequisites and its role in a visually dominated present.
The theme is open. We are looking for original photographic works that interpret the RGBefore principle in a conceptual, experimental or poetic way. Entries may consist of works that develop a coherent visual whole from three individual images taken by the artist. In this way, three-colour photography is understood not merely as a technique, but as an invitation to reorder our perception: between documentation and construction, between the fleeting moment and composition, between historical practice and the contemporary gaze. Three individual photographs come together to form a new whole.