On the Wonder

“A photographer's gift to the viewer is sometimes beauty in the overlooked ordinary."
(Saul Leiter)

George Town. Penang, 10 November 2018

 

Photography teaches wonder, how to look at the world through different eyes. There was a famous Italian poet, Giovanni Pascoli, who in 1987 – taking up a Platonic myth – theorized, about poetry, how each of us should keep alive the “Little Boy”, to keep in touch with the world through the imagination and sensitivity and allows us, in adulthood, to surprise us again.

Because growing up means losing that attitude that children have, where everything is new and worthy of wonder. Then we grow up, there are the children to think about, the mortgage of the house to be paid, the bills, the quarrels, the misunderstandings, the mourning, and the emerald green of the leaves slowly becomes red, then golden and then dries up and falls.

But what life is a life that is worthy of being lived only halfway, or only in its beginning?

Every moment deserves a new look.

Because, as the ancient Greeks taught, we are impermanent, we do not last, but we are passing through and every moment is different from the other, it is an epiphany, a birth. And it makes no sense to worry about death, because when we are there it is not here, and when there is death we are not there, as the Greek philosopher Epicurus said. So, in the end, it's not our problem.

While it's up to us to open our eyes, enjoy the banality, make the usual unusual. I try, as possible as I can. Photography has helped me a lot, because the camera is a grid, it's a frame.

If there is one thing that causes me great annoyance, it's to discard the gift card and find a beautiful photo frame with a sample photograph inside; it seems to me an abuse. The first thing I do is remove that printed paper with smiling faces that I don't know; better to keep an empty frame forever than one with a photograph that I did not choose. We are our choices.

And when you take a photograph you have a great responsibility towards yourself, because you are making a choice. Of all the world in front of you, you choose what to do to enter the viewfinder rectangle.

The ability to choose is combined with the astonishment of seeing and the pleasure of doing it.

The walls are, in this, my great source of inspiration. It's not that before I ever had this inclination, it started when I lived in Malaysia, I don't know why, as if the colors of the walls there, the molds, had another language: I found them very poetic walls.

It often happened that I was on the street, observed in a strange way by people who saw me staring at the walls or the trunks of the trees.

But this is precisely the “Little Boy”, the child does not care about the judgment of adults, as the Little Prince said it's a bore to explain things to adults every time.

 

And here one morning, during a photographic walk with a friend of mine, in George Town, he took me to see the ruin of an abandoned house inside the area of the Aceh Mosque.

It was a very old house, completely ruined, in which the vegetation had started to eat the walls, creating an intertwining of stone and life.

What was someone's living home was now completely defunct, but the vegetation and trees that grew inside it were giving it a new form of existence.

And their colors were incredible.

 

My friend left me in there like in a park of wonders, intent on watching.

It's not possible to explain in its deepest meaning to those who have never really looked at how pleasant and mysterious this simple act is. It is no coincidence that the symbol of Freemasonry is the symbol of the eye in the pyramid. Indulge yourself in our eyes and let things, shapes, dreams unfold before us.

In Italian language, a nice term spiegare (“to explain”), has two meanings: to spread and decipher, to elucidate, to reveal; the reality that is explained in our eyes.

 

I don't know what will inspire you in these photographs, which seem to be like paintings of contemporary, expressionist and abstract art, or like the works of Alberto Burri.

They are only walls of an abandoned house, but look with all the wonder of the child in me and, I hope, in you too.

“Who wants to grab the invisible,

must penetrate into the bowels of the visible

(Max Beckmann)

Giovanni Pascoli: “Il Fanciullino” (Feltrinelli, 1992)
Jostein Gaarder: “Sophie's World” (Longanesi, 1994)

Italian version

Dunia Sophie: Novel tentang Sejarah Filsafat
 Jostein Gaarder