Jorge Pedra
My work in photography dates back to the mid-1970s.
Most of my projects don't follow the canons of "straight photography." Ansel Adams or Cartier-Bresson would "disdain" my work.
In this context, I made painting on photographs: enamel or acrylic applied canvas or paper impressed with potography; slide manipulation: painting, scraping, melting the film; collages, sometimes using stearin; rayograms; prints on paper from manipulated negatives.
Since the beginning of digital photography, I've also done image manipulation on the computer (drawing, painting, digital collages), without losing, however, the reference to photography, always explicit in the images.
This probably makes me a "photography user" more than a photographer. So, according to the term used by Robert Heinecken, I may call myself a “paraphotographer”. Most of the time, my main goal is to provoke an aesthetic emotion, in a way that turns the picture into an art object, often an abstract one, or close to it.