On the Roof of Freedom

Quadraro. Rome, 12 May 2010

How much time has passed ...

Photographs are like vessels, or caskets on the desk.

You don't see the contents, but you know that you can always insert the key to open them.

What is stored there never disappears. At most, you forget.

And how many emotions we forget in our existence.

Like drops of water that slides on the skin when we leave the sea: we remember the swim, not those drops.

This is, at times, life. We remember the important events, what hurt or made us happy but we tend to forget those micro emotions that arose from those events.

If we could remember every little variation in our feelings throughout our lifetime, accumulating, maybe we would go crazy. We would explode.

Forgetting is also a form of survival.

Therefore, we carefully set aside those drops in the casket of our memory, to let them go into oblivion.

But the photographs keep them.

Going back to an old photo means bathing in that ancient sea.

This happens, at least to me.

 

It was May of 2010.

I had recently started taking photographs. Just a few years but I had already decided that it would be the path that would make me happy.

As at every beginning, I didn't choose, I let myself be carried away by events.

With curiosity; that has always remained with me.

The curiosity and ingenuity of those who discover a new game to give shape to dreams.

 

I photographed the Bangladeshi people I met in Rome.

There are reasons that are also inexplicable to ourselves.

Like the first time I visited the villages of a specific area of Java in Indonesia. I then wrote that, perhaps, in a previous life I was a village child running in the rice fields.

We have to somehow rationalize what appears to be an emotional mystery.

Why certain melodies rather than others make us cry or some colors make us disgusted, while others we would watch them for hours...

Everything has a reason; the problem is that we often ignore it.

 

I never understood why, from the beginning, I felt a very strong attraction for these people. I said to myself for the colors, the intensity of the gaze, the simplicity overflowing with chromatism of the salwar kameez.

The answer is much simpler: there is no answer.

It's something that goes too deep and we don't get there.

As when from the top of the cliff you see the flickering figures of the stones in the bottom of the crystalline water. You are seeing them but you know you will never be able to reach or touch them because proximity is an optical distortion – they are too deep; you cannot touch them.

I believe that certain things go like this.

It took me a whole life to understand that the philosopher Wittgenstein was not wrong: what cannot be talked about must be kept silent.

But this does not mean that we cannot enjoy the emotions that such sight or sensation gives us.

Not all things need to be grasped rationally.

Sometimes it is also nice to float in the indefinite.

 

That day a woman I recently knew, from Bangladesh, let's call her Dharna, invited me to her house to take portraits.

I went to this condominium, in the Quadraro, an area I had never been to. Very popular neighborhood.

It was not yet customary for me to enter the homes of Bangladeshi families. I wandered around with curiosity and timidity.

Since then, it was clear to me that the secret to telling good stories was to enter people's homes and lives.

Everyone is able to photograph events, festivals, people in the streets; but when the doors of the private are opened, then the discussion becomes deeper.

But these things one understands better with time.

 

That was the typical apartment where different families lived: what amazed me then but will become the norm in the years to come.

A family also lived with my friend, but her husband was at work that day. In fact, after a while, a young woman appears, intrigued by what was happening and who I was.

People are different whether you meet them outside or inside the home; closed to the safety of their own home, they lower their protections more easily. It is easier and more immediate to approach their essence.

While my friend was exuberant and happy to be photographed like a celebrity, the other woman watched with a shy smile at the edge of the room door.

With an imperceptible thrill of the body as if to hold back something.

Only when she thought she had waited the due time, she asked me with extreme shyness if I could photograph her with her little son.

Of course, ...

 

She disappeared to return with a child whose age I do not remember but was not more than three years old.

The boy had a malformed nose.

She only asked me a favor, with lowered eyes, not to publish the photographs of her son. With the trembling voice of someone who is ashamed of being ashamed.

It was a mother's request. I reassured her.

We took more photographs.

Then she asked me if I wanted to see the roof of the apartment.

My friend was thrilled too, thinking how beautiful portraits with the sky would be.

So, we went up the stairs of the building, until we came out on the roof.

 

 

I still took some pictures of my friend, then she decided to change her dress, since I was there, she wanted to take advantage of it to have many shots.

So, the young mother and I were left alone, with her son.

And there everything took a different turn, in a few moments.

By now she felt calmer, and being on that roof, away from all eyes, I think made her feel totally free.

Now she knew that the face of her son I would never show it.

And her friend was not there now either. It was just me, her, her baby and my camera.

Here, then, she almost began to dance in front of me.

I still remember it well.

It looked as if the concrete of a dam had cracked and tons of water had burst through it.

She started kissing her son, rocking him. Then, which I saw do for the first time in my life, she grabbed him by the feet making him stand straight.

I was shocked; terrified that he might fall, but both the baby and the mother laughed without the slightest concern.

Then I realized that I only had to photograph.

She was doing all of this for me – and for herself.

 

When I got home, I was really happy.

Even now, when I pulled these old photographs out of my memory box, I feel like smiling.

It all seems so clear.

Her journey from initial shyness, distrust, shame for that child with the deformed nose.

And then, on that roof, how all of this was blown away.

It really seemed that she was not simply on the roof of a building, but of the whole of humanity.

Finally, free to express and explode in all her maternal love for him.

The deformation that disfigured the child's nose had value on the earth, among the people, in the house, making it shy and compliant.

But in the solitude of the sky and of my camera, her son returned to be her great love, unconditionally.

There was no judgment. Nor prejudice.

 

I have rarely seen maternal love so strongly expressed.

Almost with joyful arrogance, so much had it been forced into the walls of shame.

And all these thanks to a camera, which like a secret key opens unexpected doors.

I wanted so much to tell her that she shouldn't feel embarrassed by her childlike appearance, but I would have experienced it as a force.

It was enough to see her dance happily with her son, among the clothes hanging out to dry, the television antennas, and the clouds.

 

I don't even remember her name anymore.

I don't know what happened to her.

I have only these few photographs that I share with you, keeping the ancient promise not to show the face of her son.

 

When people ask me, what Photography has taught me, well, I think this is a wonderful lesson.

Italian version