If a photograph loses its meaning...

Dhaka, February 2020

  

The task or goal of photography, like any form of art, is – in my opinion – the symbiosis between what one feels or thinks and what is shown. If sentiment and artistic results travel on divergent tracks, there is something wrong.

That was the positivist vision of language that Wittgenstein had in the first period of the “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”, which fascinated me a lot when I was a student of Literature and Philosophy at the University, and I wrote a lot. A word has a meaning therefore whoever reads that word understands exactly the meaning of whoever pronounces it.

Then Wittgenstein himself understood that things were not exactly like this, that one thing is the signs and another is their meaning, and this varies according to the private history of those who interpret that sign, of the silences between a word and the other, of the emotional and physical aspect that falls outside the words, of the “linguistic game” that is played with them.

This is true not only in the Philosophy of Language but in any artistic form.

I was now convinced that I had overcome the disappointment that had led me to abandon writing and then to embrace photography with passion.

The image has its charm in being vague, a suggestion.

However, with my bitter awareness, I have not lost that initial vision that leads me to believe that the signs must still be the clear mirror of my thoughts and feelings. After all, I love to see the photographs of those great masters who sprinkled their souls in those images: Raghu Rai's or Raghubir Singh's love for their India, Araki's infinite affection for his wife Yoko, Mary Ellen Mark for Bombay prostitutes, Follmi's pietas for miners in Bolivia...

I could go on like this for pages and pages.

 

So there is no greater disappointment than seeing your work not understood, misunderstood, or, worse, misinterpreted.

And on one of the nerve centers of my feeling, which is that of showing beauty where it is apparently not seen.

When I go to any city in Asia, I always try to go and see with my own eyes the places considered ugliest and most dangerous, because I know that the danger is only in our heads and there are many forms of “dirt”, not only that of clothes or houses.

No one will ever deny my boundless love for Bangladesh. I think I am in Rome one of the photographers who for the longest time has tried to tell the Bangladeshi community that has lived with us for over 13 years: now it is the third generation that I see growing under my eyes.

I have been teaching Bangladeshi culture through my photography courses since 2013. And finally I managed to go to Bangladesh in 2020, even if only for a month and only in Dhaka.

What I show is what I have seen.

You cannot hide the traffic, the human tangle that moves everywhere, clogging streets and sidewalks. Dhaka has an area of 300 km², compared to 1,200 in Rome, it is a quarter of our city but with 14 million inhabitants against 4 million in Rome.

There are residential districts, areas inhabited by elegant and clean diplomats but without movement and closed by security.

There are shopping malls that are identical to those of any Asian capital, and not so different from ours.

Then there is life. The one you see bustling around the sidewalks when you cross the city in rick-shaw. That of the markets. The one who struggles to get on a bus, as happens every day to each of us in our beautiful and modern capital. The one that dresses in bright colors to look like a butterfly that flies and lands on the garbage and the gray of the streets that have nothing to envy to our heaps of garbage with seagulls, mice, and wild boars. But without that poetic touch of color given by the clothes of Bangladeshi women.

 

Dhaka, February 2020

Here, I have always thought that all this was clear, and legible in my photographs. But this seems to offer a bad image of Dhaka or Bangladesh.

There is nothing that saddens and pains me more. With a naivety that I thought I had lost, and a certain realism a la Wittgenstein's first way, I truly believed that all my passion for photography and love for the subjects I portray emerged without any possible misunderstanding.

For me, the real wealth of a country is in its people and not in the cleanliness of the streets or in the trendy shopping centers, or the postcard landscapes.

It's not a dress more or less worn or blackened by the years and by the road that affects the value of a city, but it is in that smile made to a stranger, even in the midst of a thousand daily difficulties, that all the greatness lies. What we have lost for many years and that Asia makes me miss every day.

That calm and colorful survival which is the sign of the true soul of a people.

Even if it seems counterintuitive, I really think that the poor laugh more than the rich. Just as children laugh more than adults.

For me, there is no better way to describe a city than to show the beauty of its people, their smiles, their kindness.

If this is not understood then for me it no longer makes any sense to continue taking photographs, as well as when I decided to stop writing poetry because no one could fully understand the meaning of my words and the feelings that were collected there.

It is obvious – and fortunately – that everyone reads the images as he believes and feels, but there should always be the recognition of the love that pervades every photograph.

If those smiles, those colors, and those bright eyes are not enough, then it means that I don't know my job.

 

This is not to say that I won't go on until the end of my days looking for color every morning and loving every unknown person I meet on the street.

But this wound will still bleed for a long, long time.

 

Dhaka, February 2020

Italian version