Historical Context
The recognition of this second stage of ICM —the Allegorical and Baroque phase— requires not just practice but theory. Its place within contemporary abstraction depends on how deeply it articulates its philosophy of light and gesture.
Abstract photography has existed for decades, often celebrated for its formal beauty and detachment from representation. Allegorical imagery, on the other hand, has long roots in painting, literature, and cinema, where symbols and metaphors construct layers of meaning. Yet in photography these two paths have rarely converged.
This is where Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) becomes essential: it provides a pictorial bridge between photography and painting. Its impressionist aesthetics — dissolving forms into light and color — combine naturally with expressionist gestures that convey intensity, tension, and emotion. But ICM also opens a direct channel to cinema: long exposure transforms the still image into a temporal event, and complex camera gestures echo the travelling shot, where the viewer is carried through space and time.
In this dialogue of four traditions — painting, photography, allegory, and cinema — abstraction gains narrative depth, allegory gains visual power, and photography gains a hybrid language capable of evoking and symbolizing at once. Allegorical Abstractionism emerges precisely from this convergence: a movement where ICM transforms reality into metaphor, aligning abstraction, allegory, pictorial vision, and cinematic rhythm within the photographic frame.
Theoretical Necessity
In a world overwhelmed by images, abstraction alone can sometimes be reduced to decoration, while allegory alone can become didactic or illustrative. What is missing is a framework that binds emotion and idea, atmosphere and narrative, into a single gesture. Allegorical Abstractionism is born out of this necessity: to move beyond the purely aesthetic or the purely rhetorical, and to create images that breathe like poems — where visual intensity and symbolic depth are inseparable. In this synthesis, the photographer becomes both witness and author —not of appearances, but of meanings.
Technical Differentiation
Most guides to ICM describe simple actions: panning, tilting, rotating. These are introductory gestures, but they cannot account for the layered complexity of movements that dissolve, fracture, and rebuild the scene into something new. My practice embraces multi-directional, orchestrated camera gestures — closer to painting with light than to recording an event. It is as if performing a travelling shot in cinema: the camera does not merely move, it transports the viewer through space and time inside a single frame. It is choreography rather than chance —architecture rather than accident. This technical departure is essential to Allegorical Abstractionism, where form and metaphor are inseparable from the very act of exposure.
Legacy, Responsibility, and Future
This new stage of ICM carries a collective responsibility. The gesture must not be effect, but meaning. The image must not be decoration, but revelation. Artists working within this field are invited to build upon these foundations —to explore the allegorical, the baroque, the human. Within this shared philosophy, diverse voices will arise —northern and southern, minimal and baroque— yet all guided by the same allegiance to light, time, and consciousness. The New ICM will not depend on institutions to define it; it will define itself through light, time, and consciousness.
The camera no longer depicts —it experiences.
The image no longer represents —it remembers.
The gesture no longer blurs —it reveals.
This is the New ICM: a luminous act of being.
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