What Your Eyes See...

“May what your eyes see

stay in your heart.”

(Aymara oral tradition)

Kampung Tegalsari Bojong, Kc. Mungkid. Magelang, 11 November 2017

The photographs taken from behind people are always very particular. What makes them special is that they transform a simple and daily event, such as walking, into something highly symbolic.

One of the most famous photographs in this sense is Eugene Smith's “Walk to Paradise Garden”, taken in the summer of 1946, when he took a walk with his two children, Pat and Juanita, towards a sun-bathed clearing.

A photo that soon became iconic, in which it is not difficult to read the metaphor of childhood, that fairy era which seems to live in a paradise garden, in fact. Quite another thing about Smith's last famous shots from the Minamata village, which instead narrate the monstrosities of adulthood.

“Walk to Paradise Garden”, W. Eugene Smith, 1946

Even the photographer Reza, in his “The profession of the photographer” tells of how his photograph of the child in the refugee camp in Burundi is one of his favorites among those with which he documented the tragedy between the Hutus and the Tutsis in 1994:

“He runs alone, trying to protect himself. There is such a bewilderment, such a fragility. In these two photographs, the boys are taken from behind while the landscape accentuates the despair. Loneliness has no face. It's universal.”

Burundi. Reza, 1994

This was the subject of my speech on the language of photography, in Malaysia, which then earned me the contract the following year in the University for the realization of the book I spoke to you about.

I used this photo taken in a retirement home in Penang as an example.

At the end of an event organized by my University for nursing home guests, I followed the elderly women back to their rooms. They didn't know that I was following them, everything was extremely natural, but photographing them from behind, in the long corridor, turned them into a metaphor, because if it is true that photography, like all artistic expressions, has its own language and grammar, not so different from words, then even a photo can use the rhetorical figure of the metaphor.

The corridor then becomes the path of life, elderly women without a face lose their identity and represent the last age of life with its slow and curved gait, and the shimmering light at the end of the corridor that everything fades becomes what everyone we know, and where each of us is headed.

Retirement home for the elderly. Pusat Jagaan Darul Hanan, Pongsu Seribu. Penang. Malaysia, 30 November 2017

As if it were the mirror metaphor of Eugene Smith's photo, no longer walking in the Garden of Paradise, but walking towards the Garden of Paradise, to close the cycle of existence.

With children holding hands in the enchanted garden and elderly women who, on the other hand, walk alone, because you know, each of us dies in solitude: death is always a private matter.

It's for this reason that, by far, at this melancholic photograph I prefer this other one taken in a village in Magelang, in the central Java in Indonesia. One of my photographs that I love most.

Here, too, there are two elderly ladies, of whom I know nothing, they could be two sisters or simply neighbors, but there is a sweetness in them in supporting each other that is missing in the photo of the hospice for the elderly.

Indeed, it seems that they are the elderly version of the children of Eugene Smith, and more than just mirror reflection: it's true, they do not walk in a garden but between walls and bricks, but that is their village, their home, their world.

It seems that together, one next to the other, one in support of the other, they gather within themselves all the effort and experience of the whole existence, as only the elderly are able to do.

When you have the opportunity to see moments like these, the beautiful saying of the South American people Aymara comes to mind: “May what your eyes see stay in your heart.”

If we were able to fully understand these words, sadness would only be a footprint on the beach near the waves of the sea.

W. Eugene Smith: “More real than reality” (Contrasto, 2011)

Reza: “The profession of the photographer” (Contrasto, 2012)

Italian version