Alessandro Passerini
Chicago Center for Literature and Photography Photographer Feature, 02/06/14 Edited by Rebecca Vipond Brink
Location: Emilia - Romagna - Abruzzo, Italy Born in Ferrara (Italy) in 1975, Alessandro Passerini is a photographer for Art+Commerce/VOGUE and has been active in the visual arts for more than twenty years. He is the founder of the Collective TM15, which organizes solo and group art expositions; and is the art director for t the Italian Prize for Painting and Photography “B. Cascella” and the Italian Award for Contemporary art, “P. Occhi.” Since 2007 Alessandro has been one of the artists promoted and sold by the Saatchi Gallery in London. Since 2012 he has been part of the PhotoVogue photographers project for VOGUE Italia, and in 2013 his photos were published by National Geographic in the Your Shots project.
What do the mountains mean to you? I’ve been a soldier, rifleman, and assault and platoon commander in the Italian special corps: Alpini, mountain troops. The training was harder than you can imagine. However, as we climbed in sun, frost, and storms, never taking the same path, I witnessed spectacles of nature: the peaks of the Alps become pink and “talk” during the night, when the wind passed over them; the largest herd of deer in the Alps, who often came down the mountains with us at arm’s length; wolves and foxes in the snow, who didn’t understand what we were, and fled; incredible silence. This was what I left with, from that military experience; they never leave me. I love the mountains and all that they are.
You shoot animals beautifully; where do you find them? This is a plateau, in Centre Italy, named Campo Imperatore, at 1600 meters high. It reaches 3000 meters at its highest. Between 1937 and 1948 the mountaineer, photographer and writer Fosco Maraini, together with Giuseppe Tucci, explored Tibet, then pristine and untouched. From his travel notes, he drew “Secret Tibet”, a book that was a huge success and was translated into twelve languages. Back in Italy, he explored his own mountains in more depth. When he found the Campo Imperatore, Maraini described it as Tibet on a small scale, in the valley of Phari Dzong, coining the term ‘Little Tibet’, which is still in common use. Here today we see herds of wild horses, shepherds and sheep transhumance, and see some of the mountain hermits return from the forests. I often explore the plateau, and even more often begin to play with the wild horses, for hours and hours.
Many of your photographs are very grand and breathtaking, but there’s a portion that are lighter and funnier, that have a sense of childhood about them. Is that something you try to capture? Where do you strike the balance, or are those two things related, childhood and grandeur? I think they’re related, and I admit to not having ever thought clearly about it before. In taking a picture there is total instinct, similar to that of a child. I’m not interested in trying for the ‘nice picture.’ And in any case it is virtually impossible to get rid of more than twenty years of Visual Arts, so I think that everything goes in much more fluently. Zen, applied to photography, would read: “Learn photography, become the photography, forget the photography, start to photograph.” I think I have just started to photograph...
When you capture adults, they tend to either be very impersonal - with their backs turned - or very personal, as in two people who are very physically close. Where does that duality come from? People intrigue me, even though I could basically be described as a ‘misanthrope,’ and in fact I often find myself for days in the mountains. But people make me curious, as they would make curious a child. When their backs are turned, it is for two reasons: in panoramas they are relating to of nature itself, probably with the same philosophy as in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, a Romantic painter. If there are views taken from behind it is because this way people are entirely themselves, without fictions, in their everyday life. And that fascinates me. When you see the face, then they often are people I know and to whom I am linked. But there are also cases in which they are total strangers, and I try to steal some shots without them noticing, in order not to lose the naturalness of that character.
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