The Eternity of Faces

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.”
(Kahlil Gibran, “The Prophet”)

Manipulation

These days I have been unwell, so I have had more time to spend at home and go back to see many photographs. Especially mine; old and recent. Inevitably, my attention fell on the faces. Dear portraits.

For the first time, I suffered from vertigo. Terrible. Perhaps an ear infection has damaged the inner labyrinth giving me annoying dizziness. The absence of balance. This is a beautiful word: from the Latin aequlibrium, aequus “equal” and libra “libra”. Our right balance; what is missing precisely when dizziness attacks us.

Then, these days, it seems a fair metaphor of our lives, put into play by one of the greatest attacks on our balance. Each of us has been called, in different ways, to find the right balance. And we have returned to reflect on the meaning of our individual and collective existences.

 

The point of balance is intimate and relative to our life stories.

Many times, I have written about the common fabric that binds human beings, that fear of emptiness – abyss – that threatens human from the beginnings of history, to which the Greeks tried to put a lid on with the birth of philosophy, up to the answers of the different religions and to the modern anthropological-social dissimilation tactics that we have already seen in these pages – from the concealment of death and illness, as well as of the madness if not that of the different.

There is no race, religion, color or latitude that holds up. In the end, we are all children of that abyss under our feet that reminds us every moment that we are not eternal.

 

So, what do faces have to do with it?

It is that I try in every way to understand why I love so deeply to see and portray the faces of strangers, or of anyone who catches my attention.

Every passion of ours must hide a reason, I think. It should only be sought in the maze of our inner labyrinth. 

The faces, present and those imprinted in ancient photos, are what arouses me most pleasure in seeing. 

So, I tried to give a new answer. One of the hundreds that I will continue to give myself. Just as I have tried to do since I started photographing and collecting photo books. Adding one piece to another, maybe to see the complete image one day, on the point of death.

It must be said that in me that sense of emptiness under my feet is overbearing and omnipresent. If as soon as you are born you are already torn to death by the hair, and this happens twice more, then it's not difficult to understand how much I, from that abyss, cannot take my eyes off. My whole existence is a clinging of nails to the edge of the abyss.

I am ravenous in search of what leads to eternity, precisely because each of my fibers is ephemeral and volatile.

 

So, what are my eyes looking for?

I believe that everything around us is marked by time. It's an effigy of it. The buildings, the houses, every building decays. It's the bane of time. Landscapes change.

One of the attempts of the human being to escape the fate of fading has always been to create art. The art remains but must be constantly maintained, restored. 

I am not talking about the artistic content which, in fact, endures over the centuries, but the physical objects that express art. 

Of course, looking a crocodile or a turtle in the eye makes us take a step back in time.

There are old trees, that have been there for generations and generations. But they too change, transform, grow.

Nothing escapes the sign of time that flows and engraves like water in a river.

 

But the faces don't. The faces are always the same. In their infinitesimal variations, they never change. There are moments that I get lost staring at the faces portrayed in the vintage photos, in black and white. Trying to understand their questioning looks.

It seems to me as if time never passed. As if the secret of their beauty was contained precisely in this, and that it was my personal way of plugging the black hole that has sucked me in since I was born, like all of us.

In portraits, time has been won. It's true, people die, they are forgotten, but their face – a hundred years ago – is the same face today.  As if a grain of sand were blocking the hourglass funnel.

 

All this is an illusion, but it is my illusion, my dream. The significance of the enormous pleasure it gives me to observe faces in photographs.

In those faces I seek, and find, eternity. In the most mortal being of all creation there is the ultimate secret of ephemeral immortality.

 

In all its thousands of variations, we are always the same face.

As long as there are eyes watching us.

Italian version