In 2018, having worked in advertising and graphic design, Sang became disillusioned with his professional life and switched careers for photography, quickly making an income shooting live music and events. Sang's work has been hung in art exhibitions in Los Angeles and London (alongside fellow screenshotter Duncan Harris) – revealing how the lines between real-life photographs and in-game screenshots are blurring. The shot undoubtedly captures a very relatable sense of perseverance and therefore furthers the way video games now offer genuine soul-searching moments, even amid fantastical apocalyptic horror settings. A bloodied Jill gave me this feeling of a regular person looking through the window while commuting – just carrying on despite it all." "Despite feeling bruised by the world, we all still commute into work and act like everything is normal. One of the shots he considers among his greatest shows bloodied Resident Evil 3 heroine Jill Valentine having an introspective moment while sitting on a train carriage Sang describes the intent behind it with the seriousness of an artist describing a work of theirs hanging on a wall in a prestigious exhibition. Often, he tries to photograph fleeting gaming moments that have a direct correlation to the everyday humdrum of real life. This might involve spending hours carefully arranging dead bodies in a Wild West tavern in order to construct a menacing smoking gun shot, or shooting an intimate juncture where a character is lost in a daydream amid a futuristic neon landscape. Sang has created in-game photos for marketing campaigns from major gaming publishers and companies like Activision and Nvidia, and, above and beyond that, he spends a lot of his days as a hobbyist trying to capture moments with emotional substance on games such as Grand Theft Auto V and Cyberpunk2077. "A video game can be just as fruitful a canvas for a photographer as the real world is." "This idea of photographers going through unimaginable tasks just to get an image is in the past now," he claims. "But art evolves with whatever technology defines the age that it was created in.
"I guess because you're not carrying equipment through miles of rock, people think there's no struggle behind your photos and that they can't be seen as art," freelance "virtual photographer" Leo Sang, who is based in São Paulo, tells BBC Culture. Thanks to the hyper-realism of modern video games, which now boast thousands of individual facial animations and random environmental events that play out slightly differently each time you dive in, gaming worlds have evolved to become genuinely spontaneous, life-like landscapes that photographers can comb to create images with their own arguable artistic value. Blockbuster titles like The Last of Us 2, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and, most recently, Resident Evil Village have all allowed fans to take pictures from a plethora of angles and with a variety of colour filters.īut what might have initially been intended by developers as a novel way to get players to share screenshots of a game on social media (and get it trending) has led to, some claim, the birth of a genuine new artform. Over recent years there has been a proliferation of major video-game releases offering "photo modes", enabling players to capture memorable moments on their adventures with their own in-game snaps.
0 kommentar(er)
