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It seems that the safe tendency in many contemporary artistic circles these days is to avoid ” the beauty” in meaningful artworks.

Many artists, art critics and art observers in developed countries tend to focus on “deeper concerns” like social or cultural issues and placing themselves comfortably outside the beauty zone. For many, beauty is not considered tough enough to be taken seriously.

Magic Reality is certainly not afraid to address this theme. In fact, it is the main theme of this gallery. And by beauty I don’t necessarily mean the lovely models.

Here I define beauty as a deep inner feeling caused by aesthetic pleasure. It’s the proper arrangement of parts in an image to form a unified harmonious whole in order to please the eyes of the viewer. It is the ability to communicate an idea, a vision, a style or any other feeling through the proper use of visual elements.

Of course, I am aware that there are many viewers that are immune to this universal visual language and consider art something useless. I am also aware that within a photograph we can only appreciate what we know, what we understand and what we can imagine, based on our social, cultural and individual background and based on our location and the time. For these and other reasons, not all viewers are attracted to all artwork. After all, beauty in art is a subjective matter.

Another notable trend in today’s artistic circles is the admiration or acceptance for work with a lack of craft or skill. In fact, for some art appreciators this lack of skill seems to give art an authentic modern look. Everything without technique or creativity seem to be considered art. I don’t want to sound neither antiquate nor academic but I feel that a work of art is an image that is both creatively inspired and technically excellent.

Magic Reality strives to approach a high level in both the art and the craft of photography.

While the capturing of an image is an important step in the process, the real creative work starts after the image has been recorded by the camera and it’s during this post processing I am able to inject my images with feelings and emotional content.

None of the images in this gallery existed in reality in front of my lens. All existed only in my imagination and fantasy. Most of the time, creating an illusion by altering the real world is my purpose. For the last 20 years I used Photoshop techniques to create a magic world that looks like real. Sometimes magically surreal.

Magic Reality features mainly the black women of my country, which like in many other third world countries were neglected by many just for being woman and for being black.

For a long time, the black women were considered an eternal servant of the white society or as study material for social sciences which focuses mainly on themes such as race, genre, sexuality or social class. Nevertheless, very few realized their virtues and merits.

This collection focuses on many cultural and social aspects that influences life of the black women but also honors the black female for being an exceptional creation of art, an extremely exotic and glamorous human being and an excellent topic for photography!