The book of visual arts.
aIM #
The book of visual arts.
aIM #
AIM - The Book of Visual Arts. | S/F 2017 Art direction | Andrea Tinterri - relations.aimag@gmail.com Marketing | c.weitensfelder@gmail.com English translation | Daniel Clarke ISBN 978-88-99367-25-1 | Printed in May 2017 by Graffietti Stampati Publishing house: | Greta’s Books - Via Passeri 97, Pesaro (IT) - www.gretaedizioni.com Relations&PressOffice | BILDUNG Inc. - relationship.bdg@bildung-inc.com Front Cover: Gian Paolo Barbieri, Monica Bellucci, Milano, 2000 Back Cover: Gian Paolo Barbieri, Sylvia Göbbel, Vogue Italia, 1982 © Gian Paolo Barbieri
“The intensive use of photographs by mass media lays ever fresh responsibilities upon the photographer. We have to acknowledge the existence of a chasm between the economic needs of our consumer society and the requirements of those who bear witness to this epoch. This affects us all, particularly the younger generations of photographers. We must take greater care than ever not to allow ourselves to be separated from the real world and from humanity.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Smile now, as you were a moment ago. - What did you photograph earlier? - Come into the light. I remember when I used to go and visit my grandmother, I would hide my camera under my jacket, and wait for rush-hour. I thought it was necessary to hide it; I could see what I wanted from the room to the right of the entrance, which offered a panoramic view out over the balcony. All I needed to do was lean against the window, there was a cornice in front which sloped forwards, something could be seen after only half an hour, I took 23 photographs to get a feel of the movement, all in close proximity on the uphill bend. The accidents, the thunderous ones, nestled like wasps in a bus, pressed together in the crushed dimensions of the impact: thirty minutes later, the last onlooker had moved on. I photographed him as well, satiated, the detached tail of the lizard. The diseased plant that they cut down: I had been studying it for two weeks; first the posture, the acrid colours, a mass of nothing, not even fit to become sawdust, that which I had seen a while back continued. I saw them cut the neck, there was no sense of pain, no accident. The autopsy where it wasn’t even necessary to close up afterwards, how much I would have liked to have looked inside with the camera, find the lungs and conserve them on the shelf: Tree lung; the lines I would count one by one, pruning after pruning. They had carelessly snapped the capillaries, it flowed out with no-one to try and stop it, I would count it drop by drop. It is important to be able to find them again. All the printed photographs; one after another, almost
without continuity: reconstruct one two three hours; glossy or matt paper, a process over time, one image a day: a long day. Respectful of the space, a single image to hold all day: I shot at pre-established intervals, stop and lie in wait. An account lasting a year, not counting Sundays. I am still waiting for a camera which can print a photograph which is three weeks long, or a month, or maybe two, while there is still time. I’d roll it up; every turn protected by a soft cloth, I would take care not to crease it, hidden from light, I’d dedicate myself entirely to the special room for it, locking it away. - I’d like that to be my job, laughing for your camera. But you’d have to pay me, I’d pretend to read at the table in the morning and you’d understand that I’d have the fire lit in the other room; I’d make you understand that I should look for a job, that that’s what I’m doing, and they’ll probably be hiring me in ten days’ time. I asked permission to not speak to anyone and spit fire from my mouth with every answer. All I need to do is speak in front of a match, light it to feel the hot fumes with which I should fill my mouth; hope that I don’t set light to my hair, or they’ll fire me, I’ll practice at home, in the garden, if anything catches fire I’ll put it out, a modern fireeater. I’ll convey all of this with a simple movement of my elbow or a glance to one side, or the tablecloth that you will frame , with her. You should be able to understand me with three quarters of the table, and I’ll make you understand why I always wake up at 6 in the morning and why I leave my hand on the door handle for at least twenty seconds after having closed the door.
I’d do it for work. But would it be too much to have me closed away in a side table; you don’t like photographing me, do you? - It takes too long for us to age, I could photograph you continuously for three hours, you’d remain as young as a child. I photographed a new roof and the leaves that suffocated it; the tiles that turned yellow, even from afar the leaves were slimy. I’m on the third floor and it’s enough for me. I have everything, if I slot it all together I won’t even be able to see the spaces or the differences, I won’t be able to see the sticky edges; one that is twenty years long, to which I continue to add, the day is long and the room is filled with a single roll. I’ll need the whole courtyard when I keep on lengthening it. I unravel it and I don’t care about the light, the back-lighting, the grain, it just needs to be legible. I cover it with a cloth and I know it will protect me for ever, me and it feeding each other, I took one single photograph that I wanted and the colours haven’t even faded. It will never burn; how many firemen will there be in that twenty-year photograph? There will be firemen and cisterns loaded with water to put out the flames, all ready, and how many people will get out of the car? How many people in twenty years? All blowing, spitting on the blaze; not even the shadow of a black spot of smoke and then they will come to check in my room and they will strip me of the warm clothes. And how many frozen-food lorries ready to cover the flames with their fish to melt the ice; they will protect us forever. - Can I get dressed? - Whenever you want. -
by Andrea Tinterri & Christina Magnanelli Weitensfelder
Editor’s Letter
5
“I don’t like standard beauty there is no beauty without strangeness.” Karl Lagerfeld
“Even in the grotesque and labyrinthine magma of images which we absorb and metabolise on a daily basis, with serious problems of digestion, fashion photography provides a narration which is still capable of providing a stable presence in the collective imagination, in some cases paving the way for debate which is not always necessarily glamorous.”
This is probably because the fashion system, by its very nature, requires representation and a setting, and an image, above all a static photograph, manages to respond to this requirement. If we consider the iconic models conserved in our memories, what is relatively clear is the frozen image, the photograph which establishes an expression, perhaps the only one possible. Let’s take a classic case, let’s consider Marilyn Monroe. How can one not recall the scene with the skirt blown up by the wind in The seven year itch by Billy Wilder? What remains, however, is the frame of the scene, or rather that process of stabilisation of history, a transformation of movement into icon. This is why fashion photographers, both nowadays but above all in the past, have had the opportunity to construct a collective dream: an elegant subversion. Photography has that strange capacity to crystallise a single image, extracting it from a more wide-ranging account, while conserving the memory of the account itself, of the development of the narration. Gian Paolo Barbieri synthesises this particular behaviour, transforming it into the object of his poetry. In 1962 he moved to Rome and frequented Cinecittà, a large film studio lot in Rome, and became friends with Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini, to then return to Milan and concentrate definitively on photography. The constructive capacity typical of his work in fact originates from the theatre, and above all from the cinema. Barbieri sets scenes within which to invent a narration, a succession of images
which have a beginning and an end, and therefore a story, a plot. Barbieri’s photography is evasion, a spectacular dream, and his reference points are to be found, for example, in the atmosphere of the sophisticated comedy of Ernst Lubitsch, in works such as Montecarlo, The merry widow, or Ninotchka, performed by an ironic Greta Garbo. At the end of the 1980s, when fashion was above all prêt-à-porter, Barbieri seemed to not want to renounce the sophisticated fiction of black and white. An exemplary case is the session for Valentino published by Vogue Italia in 1988. The photographs were laid out as though they were moments from a filmed sequence. The introduction to the session justifies the clear stance taken by the photographer and stylist who, in this case, seem to have worked in tandem, towards a single objective: In the sparkling room full of light and mirrors of his Rome atelier, Valentino demonstrates that it is not true that divas no longer exist. Every six months, his catwalks are inhabited by a parade of exceptional creatures, new female idols who seem to be the direct descendants of Hollywood stars. This time, perhaps due to the large number of clothes in black and white, dazzling, perfect from the high heel to the hat, the sensation of magic was stronger than ever. It is as though the images were selected frames from a classic Hollywood feature film: the woman is a constant presence until the final act of the kiss where an aeroplane appears on the scene, representing a furtive, perhaps tormented love.
by Christina Magnanelli Weitensfelder
9
The model is assigned a precise role, negating the possibility of oblivion: she is transformed into an icon which can survive over time, or at least a season. Barbieri brings together two languages, that of the cinema and that of photography, but the cinema is an aspect which remains powerful. The images are to be leafed through, they are not amalgamated in an endless sequence. It is the very pause, the fragmentation which renders the woman a guiding image, dominant and domineering. The remains of time and space between one page and another, between one shot and the next. It is that interval which elevates the model, as though she were suspended for a very long moment before re-entering into the narrative flow. Moments which are potentially exhilarating: a film in very short episodes, made up of just one shot. As is the case in the 1982 session with Sylvia Göbbel, taken inside an abattoir. Meaningful objects define the character of the model/actress: a knife, the head of a decapitated ox, a cigarette held between the fingers. A seductive violence, an idea of sex at the very limits of consent. Black and white loses its velveted characteristics to become contrasted and necessarily saturated. Again in this case, a brief story is presented, the storyboard of a hypothetical film, from which it is possible to extract a single image and distance it from the rest of the narration. A continuous internal/external movement which satisfies both requirements, that of photography and that of fashion, the narrative flow and the static nature of the assimilation of memory.
The alphabet of colour. “Why is it that those who look at a photograph by Franco Fontana, and who have a minimum familiarity with the history of photography, manage to identify the author without any particular difficulty?”
The importance of a career of photographic exploration can be evaluated from various angles, and one of these is the persistence of the common imagination, or rather the sedimentation of a way of organising the world by images which is recognisable and encoded. Obviously the work of Fontana cannot be summed up in a single formula, a single direction which excludes an infinity of others. But, above all in landscape photography, an evident way of working exists in which colour and conciseness define a syntax which is recognisable like few others. He was the first in Italy to legitimise colour in photography, removing it from its amateur environment and transforming it into an integral part of creativity. In the 1960s in Italy, photographic exploration was still identified by black and white, often with a social character and an ideological commitment, which Fontana overturned, identifying a pop dynamic which painting had already explored. But the authentic language of pop is in fact most probably photography, with its capacity to infinitely reproduce, to manifest itself as publicity, as a series of icons, in a level of multiplication which verges on the excessive. Photography is a popular instrument, the standardisation of a message, a slogan transformed into an image. The collaboration formed between Mario Schifano and Franco Fontana is no coincidence: two languages which come together on a single page, colours which follow one another in the construction of a brief narration. His interest in America, journeys which bear witness to a rapport which is perhaps
initially indirect, to then be experimented with film and with a car, taking roads which perhaps do not exist, just as cowboys and Indians on horseback no longer exist. Landscapes and cities, spaces which are defined, creating synthesis of forms and lines, as if to say that the world is made up of pieces which can be played with, without worrying too much about the consequences. It is a style of photography which is lucid, not because it is light-hearted, but for its capacity to de-construct reality, break it up, highlight the various chromatic parts and leave the observer with the arduous task of re-compacting everything together. Because even if the form of the landscape is evident, nothing prevents us from re-defining the composition, and this is in virtue of the applied synthesis, of a clear separation of levels. The sky can become earth and the earth sky, trees can be moved and overturned, the skyscraper on the right moved to the centre, and the car in the centre pushed to the left. Signs, letters, punctuation, to exercise our capacity for construction. Even when the frame focuses on asphalt marked by coloured lines: arrows, right angles, points, all available in the magical photographic frame where everything can still happen. On the few occasions when people appear, they are as rigid as mannequins, objects among objects, a useful word to be included in the story, they blend in with what they have alongside them: there is no hierarchy because everything is placed on the same level, on a table from which to draw from and begin to write.
by Andrea Tinterri
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These are the components which transform a decades-long process into an optimistic form of photography: Fontana’s world is something that can still be constructed or reconstructed. There is no given truth, there is still the possibility of changing everything, of beginning from scratch: all that is needed is to change the position of the elements in order to change the perception of the story. This is no ideological form of photography, as it does not present itself as a truth, or a solution, but as a suggestion. In a photograph taken in Emilia in 1995 (page 29), a ploughed field, half-covered by snow, shares the rectangular space with the colour of the sky. Three colours: blue, white, brown. Two levels: earth and air. A vertical photograph which can be rotated. Overturning the image, the sky could become the sea, the earth dark sand, and the snow shells placed in line by who knows what strange sunbather. Multiplication of meaning, one single interpretation is not enough to narrate the world. Rotating the image to a horizontal position transforms it into the flag of a still-hypothetical country, awaiting formal officialisation. This is no simple game, but a demonstration of the flexibility of Franco Fontana’s photography, of the possible choices that the observer can make by simply changing their position. A kind of freedom which is granted almost as though it were a form of poetry, something which is detached from the camera, from the intentions of the photographer, for an infinite multiplication in which the viewer participates in the presentation of new territory.
“But You know Landscape is my mistress - ‘tis to her that I look for fame - and all that the warmth of the imagination renders dear to Man.” John Constable
“The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.� Walker Evans
The gaze of Paola Mattioli. “The true protagonist of Paola Mattioli’s photography who, over the years has, with her analogue camera, shot various subjects and created numerous and often articulated projects is, fundamentally, always the gaze.”
In a circular dynamic, the very act of looking is at the centre of the artist’s interest, simultaneously playing the role of the instrument and object of her work. This in light of that metalinguistic component which colours every one of her shots, at times more explicitly evident (such as in the celebrated series Cellophane, shots taken between 1978 and 1979, the first expressly conceptual work by the artist), at times only barely perceivable, but always present, like a trace, a common thread which has been running through her work for decades. Since her youthful debut, at the end of the 1970s, Mattioli has photographed with a lucid self-awareness, continuously examining her gaze and seeking to understand how the camera could effectively capture it. This is why Mattioli has never considered the photographic act in the direct and synthetic terms of reportage. Quite the opposite, she has always worked on constructing the image, in her mind before seeing it before her eyes, and attending to every tiny detail, even in the printing phase. By not leaving room for the naive spontaneity which is expressed in the capturing of a moment, for a logic which relates to the dimension of the instant, Mattioli calibrates to perfection every detail which will contribute to creating the final result, in order to achieve a style of photography which is not necessarily beautiful in the strict sense of the term, but which can communicate through the complex structure of the image. It is the long period of reflection which accompanies her work, a methodology which is aimed not so much at presenting facts in image form, as investigat-
ing, probing and understanding reality, not however without analysing the mechanisms and the dynamics which allow a successive translation into her visual style. This attitude, which still accompanies the artist, undoubtedly finds its raison d’être in Mattioli’s temperament and feelings, but is equally rooted in a precise theoretical requirement which derives from the artist’s intellectual education, from her studies in philosophy. Mattioli, having graduated under the guidance of Enzo Paci with a thesis which examined the very question of photographic language, examines, on a theoretic level, the ideas of the great thinkers, from Benjamin to Merleau-Ponty, and with significant questions regarding the photographic image, its profound characters, and its ambiguity. Of equal importance, however, was her experience on a practical level in the studio of Nini and Ugo Mulas, where Mattioli was an assistant for a certain period, in her early years. The practice of photography, seen as an amplification of looking – and not simply of seeing –, is not to be considered in this case as an action for its own sake, but rather as the metaphor for a way to approach the real, to approach others: with attention and participation. It is her way of examining reality which entails participation and that profound desire for sharing which is explicit in the photographs with which Mattioli examines matters which are impelling from an existential, social or expressly political point of view, particularly feminism, towards which the artist has contributed substantially since the 1970s.
by Cristina Casero
31
This form of tension animates even the more recent projects of the artist and is perceivable even in particular environments, such as fashion photography, which she has been involved in on various occasions, obtaining very original results, also due to her unconventional approach. But this is not the only case: in her wide-ranging work there is no lack of projects dedicated to themes such as mental illness among young people, class protest and above all employment, to which Mattioli has recently dedicated two important books: Dalmine and Fabbrico. In many cases, almost shy behind her camera, Mattioli creates a direct and engrossing dialogue with her subjects. The portrait is, in fact, one of her most expressive environments, that in which she appears to feel most at ease, and she often also uses this genre within widerranging projects, such as in her fashion sessions: in her work, attention is often focused on the faces of the people, with who she creates an intense rapport despite being distant from emotive immediateness. In this case, the dynamic relationship on which her methods and her way of conceiving photography is based is reaffirmed and stressed by the language of gazes, which once again brings the act of looking to the heart of the process. Mattioli’s photography, therefore, is, and has always been, founded on emotional and conceptual tensions which the artist sublimates into decanted, refined images, in which the formal attention is the result of a procedure of linguistic translation, the meaning of which is founded on the awareness of the potential of the critical gaze of photography.
BAG-gallery.com Parma - pesaro
lugano (CH) > fair Wopart
works on paper
opening: 13 sept 14 sept - 17 sept 2017
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PARMA > exhibit Jean Tinguely
Metamatic, la macchina che rende visibili i sogni. opening: 17 nov curated by andrea tinterri 18 nov 2017 - 7 JAn 2018
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BA G/G AL LE RY
PARMA > exhibit paola mattioli
nero, bianco e un punto di rosso opening: 13 oct curated by cristina casero 14 oct - 12 nov 2017
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the portfolio interview
The Rome Ballen Time. “It was his mother, Adrienne Ballen, employee at Magnum and the founder in New York of one of the first photographic galleries in the USA, the Photography House, who gave a very young Roger Ballen (1950, New York) his first camera.�
On the premature death of his mother in 1973, he suddenly departed for a journey which lasted for years, through America, Asia and Africa and which, in the gloom of his mourning, seemed to be an initiatory journey. This wandering led to his first collection, Boyhood (1979), an attempt to personally re-elaborate his childhood through pictures of children lost in desolate lands. Between the 1980s and the early 1990s, by then having settled in Johannesburg for work (he is a geologist), he concentrated on the situation in the small rural villages of South Africa. However, in 1982, to get over the difficulties of the very strong South African sunlight outside, he started working indoors (Dorps 1986, Platteland 1994). These were isolated houses, homes for the maladjusted, built on the outskirts of the cities, unsafe structures with hanging wires, missing doors and windows, crumbling walls. While up to then his attention was focused on the nature of the subjects, on entering the shanty towns, these iron huts, looking inside, he took a different, extreme path, towards the deepest darknesses of the mind. Filthy non-places where Ballen brings forth the ghosts of a collective conscience pervaded by dirty and intangible shadows (Outland 2001, Shadow Chamber 2005, Boarding House 2009, Animal Abstraction 2011, I Fink U Freeky 2013, Asylum of the Birds 2014). In this temple of unknown demons, degraded and unsettling, the human figure is definitively freed from its social role which holds it in a system, such as that of South African segregation, and an examination of the contorted manifestation of the psyche begins. For the work proposed at the Fotografia - International Festival of Rome (2016), he constructed a shanty hut, creating a meeting point of civil and personal evocations. An archetypical imaginary space which, as Ballen himself says, is capable of containing both Rome and Johannesburg, despite
not necessarily being tied to the history of the city. In the end, nothing more is known of the localisation of each shot, nothing more is known of the precise identification of those suburbs. Their position can be traced, not within a purely terrestrial geography, but in the terrestrial representation of a mental, dreamlike geography, one of nightmares, tied to the sub-conscience. Each photograph is a marginal living space which emerges solely as a dream, a hallucination. The subjects are masked. Their faces are animal-like or, at times, so anthropomorphised as to underline the union between physiognomy and sculpture, rendering the character an entity in themselves, from the subjugated personality to the total absence of prospective success. They seem nothing more than the semblance of a life on the very limits of civilisation, beings on the brink of deprivation. Robert A. Sobiezeszek, in the introduction to Shadow Chamber (2005) wrote that Ballen does not claim to represent the world, but he knows that his task is to create one, to be a photographer who models reality through images with a process which is disconcerting, disturbing and radical. Different approaches to the photographic matter allow him to define a space-world regulated by meanings which cannot be immediately explained. With pictorial and sculptural manipulation, Ballen intervenes on various levels and the solitary posters on the walls seem to be references to a world of celebrity which is far removed from the environment in which they are placed as effigies, but which however has its place in the idea of deterioration, hanging there in a hovel occupied by the abandoned. The symbolism is communication and, at the same time, an element which is compressed, together with the wide linguistic range of black and white. Everything is set out for a narrow view within strict
by Domenico Russo
45
confines, hindered from seeing beyond, remaining within the boundaries of a format which is usually square, or rectangular, in the case of the Rome series. The claustrophobic conditions of contemporary society, individual alienation and the contrast between mankind and the natural world all leap unfiltered into the foreground in their grotesque forms which, even behind the caricatural and bizarre appearance of some shots, do not in reality hide any form of humour, a factor which bears no relation to the frightening, and at times atavistic, distortions which Ballen celebrates. That which he most certainly creates is a scenographic reality and a fantastical synthesis full of meanings relating to experience, a dreamlike and surreal condition which is particularly inclined towards the acceptance of the encounter with the turbulence of a disturbing image. He emerges into an exemplary place, the other face of society, where representation and theatre, disorientation and discontent, are the gorges which he crosses and surpasses without losing himself, to explore the shadows of the mind of modern man. The evolution of his career has led him from the representation of South African life to the staging of the depths of the Id; with drawings and objects of varying nature, such as dolls, masks, tokens, Ballen thus creates a kind of environment/installation on the confines between reality and imagination, between good and evil, and between the false and the concrete. Every shot thus becomes the scene for the katabasis of observation, forced to wander the dark meanderings of a nefarious and very disturbing representation, amongst the undefinable processes of the manifestation of disquiet. It is an oppressive habitative terrain which is not transcendental, but occult, and above all psychical, thus apparent to all, but removed, not revealed.
�Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed Who do not Know the ways of the wind And the unseen forces That govern the processes of life.� Spoon River Anthology - Edgar Lee Masters
Massimiliano Camellini. On board. “There is an age-old pleasure to be derived from capturing time with analogical photography. One could almost speak of a challenge, in a certain sense, against a practice which is almost an addiction for the compulsive production of images.”
That repeated ‘click’ of accumulation which, nowadays, relegates photography to a moment, rapidly passing on to other subjects, other projects, other interests. Massimiliano Camellini, instead, responds to this latest form of consumerism with the demands of a photography which is slow, and heavily calibrated in content and form. Following the theme of ‘anthropologically centred photography’, where the protagonist is always modern man, with his need for assertion (also in terms of dignity) through work and the problems tied to its lack or loss, as well as the definition of a mental space reserved for dreams and aspirations, Camellini, with his new project Al di là dell’acqua chooses to explore the theme of the journey. ‘The idea of the journey as an eternal dream for discovery’, explains the author. The metaphorical key tied to the existential process is the common thread that links the various aspects of the study which led the photographer to the interior of cargo ships – something which is immediately evident. His journey focuses on life on board, looking beyond the surface of the sea (the ocean) which can be seen through the porthole, towards a destination which is more than just geographical. The factor that fascinates him regards the range of emotions which oscillate between a sense of freedom and the overcoming of the fear of the unknown. Camellini examines these ideas, beginning with a reading of the theatrical monologue Novecento (1994) by Alessandro Baricco (appreciating in the same manner the cinematographic version directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, The legend of 1900), before boarding – for the first time in 2012 – the cargo ships moored in the port of Genova. The same
port in which, in 1964, Lisetta Carmi produced her reportage describing the crowded docks and the conditions of the merchandise and the barges, but above all exposing the terrible working conditions. “We played because the Ocean is vast, and frightening, we played so that people could forget the passing of time, forget where they were, who they were”, wrote Baricco. This is where the element of time re-emerges, a reference point for photography. Certainly there is a difference between the ‘floating city’, the steamer Virginian, born of the fantasy of the writer (and not dissimilar from the Titanic) which, between the two wars, shuttled back and forth between Europe and America, and the goods ships framed by the photographer: those belonging to the Italian company Ignazio Messina, the Korean Hanjin Shipping, and the Japanese NYK and M.O.L. But the state of uncertainty that comes from being at the mercy of the waves, when ‘the land is but a mass of distant lights, or a memory, or a hope’ is the same. In the representation of movement, of the almost imperceivable rocking of these impotent vessels (some reach 400 metres in length), it seems that a short-circuit is formed. The duality lies in the vision of static interiors, defined by the objects which lead to the theme of the identity of the individuals and their need to construct a domestic habitat, in contrast with the movement suggested by the marine horizon. On the one hand they are heading towards the future, on the other they are anchored to the past. “The journey is the continuous readiness of the entire crew to face the future”, states Massimiliano Camellini, justifying his choice of subject. In describing the ships as places of work in which personal lives
55
can be identified, he speaks of ‘superstitious recollections’ and the desire to ‘feel calm and relaxed, faced with the prospective of the journey’. Talking with the various members of the crew – from the captain to the head of the machine room, from the first officer to the bosun, from the second in command to the cabin boy – is the first step which allows the photographer to enter into direct contact with his interlocutors. Breaking through their initial diffidence towards the indiscretion of photography, Camellini created the foundations for a relationship of trust which is demonstrated by his photography. “For the members of the crew, it is normal to see the ship as a continuous challenge, thinking that everything will be ok. They have to stay on board for months, often without ever being able to return home.” In the fifty or so photographs chosen carefully from the thousands of shots taken, that which shows the presence on board of various professional figures is meaningful: the first is the bosun (in charge of safety and internal maintenance), and the last is the cook, two figures which play the same key role. Alongside each one, a metal plate indicates that they are on board. Order and rigour regulate the dynamics of work on the cargo ships, which, in fact, resemble the mechanisms of any company “but with a much more accentuated hierarchy”. It is not simply a case of working towards a common objective – that of arriving at the destination in a certain geographic location and consign the merchandise – but the sharing of a destiny to which the survival of all those on board is bound. This is why internal regulations establish that on board, the presence (or absence) of every crew member is clear to all.
The sense of belonging to a group is therefore also a central aspect in the visual account by Camellini, which also considers the various personalities within a private moment. Conversing with the various characters, the photographer established a relationship of trust which allowed him to become closer to them, entering their cabins, with an intimacy which is usually seen as invasive, but which, due to the respect and the coherence of his approach, became accessible. Those taken by Massimiliano Camellini are indirect portraits, yet they are of such an explicitness as to recall a certain portrait style of the 1800s of which August Sander and Edward Steichen, in particular, were two masterful exponents. In their own way, these great masters of photography created a work which was a ‘cataloguing of humanity’. For Sander, this translated into an anti-heroic encyclopaedic gallery, with a psychological aspect. 1929 saw the publishing of his first book Antlitz der Zeit (The face of time), which was defined by Walter Benjamin as ‘an atlas of the human being with which to practice’. It was constructed around a selection of about sixty photographic portraits of types of person characterised according to their profession and social standing, the result of a wider-ranging work presented the previous year on the occasion of the Cologne exposition which also included the photograph Unemployed sailor, 1928), part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa). In 1955 the same New York museum presented the exhibition The Family of Man, curated by Edward Steichen, which then became a touring exhibition. Composed of images taken in 68 countries by 273 international photographers (including, as well as Sander and Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Robert and Cornell Capa, Elliott Erwitt, Harry Callahan, Jack Delano, Eve Arnold, Irving Penn, Margarethe
Bourke-White, Satyajit Ray, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Miller, Lou Bernstein, Vito Fiorenza, Bill Brandt, Herbert List, Edward Weston, Roman Wishniac) the grand fresco of a humanity in which an often ferocious reality was accompanied by an innate idea of freedom expressed in the very construction of dreams, ambitions and trust in a better word. As well as tying his name to that of Alfred Steiglitz and Camera Work, as well as the magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, after having served in the American Army during the Great War, he voluntarily enlisted in 1941 (at the age of 62) and was assigned the command of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. In 1944 he also directed the Technicolor documentary The Fighting Lady, an Academy Award winner the following year. The film documented the life on board the warships, leaving the extraordinary portraits in black and white to also evoke moments of relaxation, in which the war seemed far away, when the men rested in their bunks or were absorbed in the writing of a letter, in reading, looking at the ocean, fighting boredom and fear. An empathy similar to that which characterises the portraits by Edward Steichen can be found in the photographs by Massimiliano Camellini, in his portraits which are constructed via the objects – the details – which define his account of daily life. A cup with a crest, the captain’s peaked cap, a tie, a laptop which has a photograph of a family as its background... The close relationship which ties the subjects to places, and architectural spaces which are as physical as they are mental, is underlined by every-day objects: from a series of spanners to a pair of binoculars, the clock in the corridor which mirrors the shape of a porthole, the washing machine, the gym equipment, the ship’s wheel, the commands, the
by Manuela De Leonardis
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vegetables on the kitchen worktop, the half-moon tambourine next to the tinned fruit salad, as well as the ’mariners prayer’ or the blackboard with the words Happy Birthday Commander together with the geographic coordinates and the date (5 April 2013). Objects which express lives lived, emotions, permanently travelling from one condition to the next. One particularly eloquent photograph is that which shows the collection of passports, a direct representation of the plurality of the individuals, but also of the rigour with which the rules are applied, according to which on their arrival they must give their passports to the commander. The representation of twenty-four hours of life on board meant long and tiring sessions of work by Camellini who, to provide the images with that sense of naturalness that they represent, avoided the use of additional light, instead always using his camera with a tripod. “I used only the interior lighting of the ship which, for safety reasons, is always on, particularly in the engine areas.” – explains the photographer – “I also made extensive use of the back-lighting from windows, over-exposing the images to accentuate the contrast between the light from outside, which symbolises the prospective of the future, and from inside, which is their home. A contrast which is never exasperated, but rather balanced, in order to try and highlight the relationship between the finite and the infinite, also under the profile of light, exploiting as much as possible the potential of black and white film which, unlike digital, allows the maintaining of a certain depth which is also emotive.” The square format is also a deliberate choice by the artist made to focus attention on the subject, leading the imagination to pass through the porthole. Once again the moment perfectly framed by the the lens of the camera becomes the instant in which anything can happen.
“Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out’.” Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The Soul of The Body. “She stands before a window as if standing in front of a fun house mirror. Or if we rotate the picture 90 degrees counterclockwise, doing pushups off a glass floor. Clockwise, it takes on what they call ‘skin the cat’ off gymnastic rings or a high bar.”
The image is so bright it could be outdoors or a magazine ad where everything is white but the advertised product – in this case, Sofia Masini herself. The ceiling, floor, and walls, the curtains, the hallway in varying shades of white’s distant cousin grays, all along to the adjoining room, the open door, the heating unit behind it, the world outside the iron bars of the picture window she faces and then that abyss, the floorless adjoining room, leading us to an ocean in the mist and a walk off the plank into a blank canvas awaiting the first dab of color, likely a twirl of the paint brush as it swirls into the arc of her protean and sexy frame – it’s the only curved line in the photograph! And an amazing curve it is as she thrusts her body well out beyond her pelvis while in the same moment she’s held snuggly by a dress that girdles her buttocks like two hands cupping the weight of everything below in a tug of war with her wild top half. Fun house stuff, indeed, but in the split second the image is made, the world suddenly goes silent. This is not a film. It is a moment. It is a metaphor and metaphors are motionless. They need to give us time to see, time to think. We are in a white room, privileged to be able to see her pose, not from the outside watching her through the window, but from inside from the intimate position of the camera itself. We become the seeing eye of the lens. We’ve not only been given the key to the room, but we’re also charged with the taking the picture as it happens. The subject has no way of knowing when the moment is at its peak, when that moment comes. “Here, you take the picture,” the image beckons as she arcs into the pose, or leaps into the air, or throws herself across a couch. In such self-portraits, as demonstrated throughout this
remarkable series by Sofia Masini, we don’t just get the keys to her camera; she renders a lock of another kind, the combination code that unravels what we might call the soul of the body. For her, there can be no hiding behind doors in a shuttered house – as Francesca Woodman wannabes would be prone to do – but rather a brazen and fearless openness to work in the nude as if everyone was looking, or the reverse, as if she were the last surviving person on earth and couldn’t care less. The question mark she throws at us with her body across that blank canvas of contemporary nothingness becomes an existential query of life’s purpose. Is it just to ask the questions? At least it’s moving day. Boxes to assemble, stuff to pack. But what’s inside those boxes? All we can see is that everything is marked fragile, including the body by extension. An umbrella reminds the handlers how rain falls, meaning which way is up. There are no other labels, so what are we moving? And so here packing day becomes packing our body away. Laptops go into separate bins. Keys and coins out of the pockets. Passports clenched between our teeth. Legs spread, arms in the air. We no longer need our heads, let alone our minds, limbs, hands, or feet. The body takes the shape of an ice cube of unmelted flesh that is so boneless it can be scooped up, as it later is, curled up like ice cream into an Ikea-like side chair. The self-portrait speaks without words. It asks us to decipher what the body wants to say. In these headless self-depictions using the cursive handwriting of a body bent on performing like a snake or a clenched fist, we can come away wondering do we really need the bones in our bodies, does the brain actually reside in our heads, can we speak with our limbs? Investigating such matters in the
by Arno Rafael Minkkinen
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daring beauty of plain sight is the great pleasure one can experience in these genre-busting self-portraits by Sofia Masini. In a review of the work of another self-portrait photographer, the critic A.D. Coleman once remarked (to paraphrase and reorder the brilliant snippets of his thinking), that to avoid the facility and cleverness to which self-portraiture can too often be prone... it would seem that... the illusion of eye contact, a distinctly photographic phenomenon... can be... used to telling effect... and... by taking risks of authentic disclosure... an entire oeuvre can be shifted a step closer to the profound. Full disclosure here, following another term in Coleman’s review, I am that photographer and ever grateful for this lifelong piece of cool advice. He was writing about an image from 1973 where I am lying nude... at the very edge of a waterfall, covered by the rushing waters, staring up through them at the viewer. (Katalog, Summer, Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, 1996). Is the time ripe, I can’t help but wonder, for Ms. Masini to consider the risks of authentic disclosure? I can imagine her doing so in one of the quieter images from the series, the one where we see her not quite asleep on a plain white couch. Sleep feigned or not, fantasy or fabricated, she could turn towards us, head tilted ever so slightly, and invite us to contemplate, not only the soul of her body and how it speaks to us, but also door to the soul through her eyes. Bayard’s Self-portrait as a Drowned Man with his eyes cast downward – he was supposed to be dead after all – comes to mind. Following Coleman’s advice, it would be a real eye-opener. ©Arno Rafael Minkkinen Fosters Pond, 2017 All rights reserved.
“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.” Sylvia Plath
Snippets from the suburbs. “There was a period in Italian photography, between the 1970s and 1980s, in which documentary evidence and its uses - regarding the land, the landscape, places, and on to architecture, urban planning, inhabitants - and subjective or aesthetic images, underwent a re-examination of their respective roles, often in the form of a reduction which I believe was advantageous for both fields...”
One indication, one exemplary title could be considered Mirrors and Windows, an exhibition curated by John Szarkowski for the MOMA, whose Photography Department he was curator of in 1978, and the Italian version of that impossible contra-position between objectivity and subjectivity could be read as the end of the illusion of neo-realism on the one hand and the modern – the Subjektive Photografie which carried forward the forms and modalities of the classic avant-garde – on the other. The situation was then explained to me in clear operative and existential terms one day by Giovanni Chiaramonte: “When photographers of architecture, or professional reporters, including Basilico, went to take photographs, they already knew what they were going to do, where to go. When Luigi (Ed. Ghirri) and I went out, we never knew what we were going to do, we learnt outside, we explored”. It was not only an apparent exception from the functional, commercial or ideological aspect of one of the most fundamental hubs of mass communication via image, it could certainly not be reduced to the excessively fortunate formula of post modern or to the fulfilment of the critical dimension of photography. That generation of photographers asserted a specific intellectual function, at the same time refusing organic and instrumental reduction. The generation identified a specific history of images: Walker Evans instead of Capa, August Sander instead of CartierBresson, Atget instead of Doisneau; it was full of references to literature, music, painting – often divided between metaphysics and surrealism, – it fed on the cinema of Rossellini, the Nouvelle Vague and Antonioni, often retracing the geography, the locations.
At this point I should apologise to Allegra Martin because I am using too much of the little space I have in writing about others, but the thing is that I believe her work demonstrates the extreme vitality of that approach, that story, and that which can be seen of her work appears to me to be among the most interesting of results in a season which, too soon, is often considered concluded, together with – thinking of the images – a devouring of the state of art which is more marketing than technology. Martin has followed a complex path: from the Triveneto area, Architecture in Venice, the encounter with Guido Guidi, a maestro who is free of dogmas but, perhaps for this reason, is one of the most prolific for the generations that follow him, photography as an act of appropriation which is a consequence of drawing, an intense activity of participation in projects of description, those promoted by the legendary Emilia-based institution Linea di Confine with William Guerrieri, up to the experience of Exposed. An idea of a dialogical project, always seen as dialogue with other forms of writing, other authors, and the relationship with the great literature of the outside world abandons the presumption of the photographer-demiurge, the author who provides an editing of the visible. The project is provoked by the images, not vice-versa, and this requires particular control, a particular awareness of the fact that every topography makes sense only through internal resonance, something which exists between the maker of the image and the viewer. Thus, basing a collection on a choice, a portfolio like the one published on this occasion, loses the
by Paolo Barbaro
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meaning of ‘Best of ’, it is a temporary term – in a topographic sense, the object which is collocated, perhaps hidden, to understand where we are – with respect to a territory of very personal images, highly expanded, highly plural. Of course, there is much documentary tradition, much discipline, even if it is transfigured and introverted: the figures speak of their existence with indications, even sociological, by simply being shown, without any recital – Sander, of course – but it would be wrong to label these as sociological photographs. The photography in Savignano is sufficient, so evocative of a world without defining the architecture – and we know, in the specifically professional work of Allegra Martin, how honed her instruments are in that environment – and by hiding the figure, of which we can see only a pair of generic trainers. Then Ravenna, every image refers to a level transcription, always very material – the choice of the film, a matter which impresses matter and remains... – but which develops in infinite internal and external references: the flaking stage for local celebrations in the background behind the central figure, disorder on the side of a road geometrised as though in an example of ‘Land Art’ between two stays that hold something unknown... Then Switzerland, with a Freidrich-style Pilgrim who looks like an out-of-place office clerk in the most orderly country in Europe. Every image seems to disclose an account and has an almost essayistic dimension, to retrace the references and collocations would require much more space; it would be better, for now, to leave the story to them, the photographs which speak of us.
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” On Photography - Susan Sontag
“A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.� Don DeLillo, Underworld
s/ f 2017 ISBN 978-88-99367-25-1
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