Uses of Photography –XI/ Cast – Double Zero
A conversation with Julio Grinblatt never really starts; organically, it continues. Perhaps art is the underlying thread that ties us into a ceaseless conversation, flowing like the infinite surface of a Möbius strip, where themes interlace—from the artist to the friend—seamlessly. The dialogue is merely a pretext for weaving a hypertext about experience, the human condition, identity, belonging, and nomadism. Ontologies of where-how-when intertwine like interlocking rings, mutually sustaining one another without defined boundaries, where each forms the structure of the other, and the absence of one dismantles the interwoven ecosystem. The arguments, in perpetual motion, anxiously pursue the impossibility of balance—perhaps forever.
Uses of Photography –XI/ Cast – Double Zero is another chapter in a series of works Julio has developed over the years, aiming to taxonomize perception through the specificities of the photographic medium. Uses focus on criteria selected by the artist, reflecting his interest in developing and exploring his obsessions: the photographic act, perception, printing, developing, the effect on the viewer, the act of recording, among others. In this iteration, he surprises us with a sense of clarity that transports us to spaces where humanity vibrates—to obvious things that are not so obvious, to humor and the innocence of the “child who, when he was a child”—as Peter Handke would note—” …did not make faces when photographed.”
It’s speculated that one of the unintended consequences of the invention of fire was the strengthening of human relationships that arose from sharing a fire on a cold night. The warmth of the fire not only provided shelter but also acted as a catalyst for companionship, creating a primary social nucleus with implications for the development of future communities. A value that, though nonexistent before, becomes tangible and real once it is identified. Julio invites us to approach his work not as passive observers but as a community of active participants in an ever-constructing dialogue.
Within the Uses series, Chapter VII, simply titled Photos, Julio organized a table filled with images of dear people of the art milieu taken between 1985 and 2016 from his personal archive in a vacant apartment. For three weeks, he invited the artists and subjects portrayed in the series to share the collection. In addition to being the host and taking part in the performance, Julio was a witness to the communal event and the emotion that radiated from encountering the memories reflected in the images of loved ones. What was remarkable about the performance was that its emotional impact transcended the intimate. Beyond indexing the specific uses of a constantly evolving medium, his selection and editing surprise us and point us toward a way of seeing capable of revealing a value that, in these times of high moral contamination, becomes an essential oxygen to breathe.
In this iteration of the series, Cast is presented—a work consisting of 16 pieces depicting a mummy posing as a photographer with a Nikon F camera, capturing its own photographic act before becoming a fossil. The portraits are accompanied by Muybridgean flipbooks that grotesquely reanimate the subject, destined to become a trace, an archaeological remnant. Cast transports us to a world of associations where nostalgic humor and generational references intertwine with the tragedy of the inevitability of time, documenting gestures that shaped our perception and that today are relics of a discipline in constant transformation.
And just when we think we have learned the lesson of Uses, the series surprises us with a new chapter: what is not taught—that which is revealed when we curiously observe an accident. It is the moment when the beauty of the objet trouvé catches us off guard and the absence of logic unsettles us. Thus, we are invited to the seductive result of the final product. The 00 series, composed of a set of images recovered by serendipity from his archives, represents an incursion into the artist’s intimacy, which he chooses to share with the observer. It’s a voyeuristic window into a moment of the photographic process, where chance takes control of the result. A process perhaps influenced by John Cage: what escapes control is reappropriated by Julio Grinblatt as a work of art. Just as Cast is accompanied by a flipbook, 00 is complemented by a digital montage of the images in the series, played in a 30-photo-per-second loop that, like a relentless mantra, submerges us in a hypnotic wandering. A visual cloister that reanimates, through movement, what the frozen image longs for—a fitting conclusion to a long journey—in this case, that of Uses—where all memories collapse into a single moment, a place, an Aleph illuminated and illuminating the next path to follow.
The process behind Grinblatt’s work is an act of visual and conceptual exploration, using the medium as a tool to question perception and the meaning of the image. Each of his series is an exercise in deep observation, where the process becomes part of the work itself—a mechanism for reflection, in contrast to the crude commentary on the ephemeral that contemporary media propose, designed to provoke instant gratification, an immediate reaction distancing us from experience. Julio is desire without mediation; he proposes reclaiming the experience by “reanimating” our perception. His work is defined by conceptual rigor, near-obsessive technical control, and impeccable execution.
Uses is an invitation to experience—an escape for a few moments into Truffaut amusement park, into a Möbius-like zoetrope: where the observer, from a peripheral gallery, merges into a dynamic image populated by the artist and his subjects. Light, form, and movement activate, take on meaning, and remind us of an essential human dimension that energizes us to face a world on the brink of paradigm shifts—where the human, moral, and civil arguments we once took for granted now stand on the edge of existential collapse.
Iair Rosenkranz, New York, 2025
