Past and Present – Part Two

Lecce, 13 August 2009

Children and Color

Rome, 16 August 2009

Almost all the photographs of that period are in black and white because when you are at the beginning you are dazzled by the fascination of black and white, which is form and substance.

Also because when you see the images of the great masters who made the history of photography, that is the dominant note.

But then, the children arrive and they bring joy and color.

As I titled my first photographic exhibition, with their portraits, “Children save me”.

Maybe it's because I spent my childhood in the pediatric wards of hospitals and it wasn't exactly like that of other children. Therefore it is as if that phase of life, the most beautiful, had remained encapsulated in the closet of my soul.

And I am still convinced that they can hear it.

There is an invisible thread that binds me to them.

Precisely because my childhood was encapsulated it never completely disappeared, and only children know this.

 

This photograph of the little Filipino girl dancing on the street (giling, in Tagalog) has long been a favorite of mine and also of many of my friends.

Her joy is irrepressible and contagious.

Like the color.

If black and white are, in fact, form and substance, the essential, color is the superfluous, the distraction, but also the richness it brings with it in its symbolic and cultural meanings.

Then for me, the answers are not many: I prefer color because existence is in color.

Color is the substance of life itself, more than form.

My visual mind follows the path of painting that from the precision of the Renaissance has come to the disintegration of forms into pure splashes of color first of Impressionism and then of Expressionism.

Just as children break the rules of our well-defined lives, with their bursts of laughter and their sudden dances.

Most of my portraits are of women and children.

What I love most.

The photo of the little Filipina dancing has no time, I may have taken it yesterday.

And I hope it will be the same one that I will be shooting in twenty years.

Composition and Metaphor

Lecce, 13 August 2009

Composition is one of the most complicated things you learn in photography and it takes a long time.

Then I think there is also an absolute eye, as in music there is an absolute ear, so – in very rare cases – the eye is a perfect device that gives impeccable images even in a few clicks.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, to say.

It is perhaps no coincidence that many of the most famous photographers also loved painting and music.

 

For me, composition has always been very important, and photography remains essentially the act of putting the eye in the viewfinder, which is an empty rectangle to be filled. Excluding everything else.

In this, I think the drawing and painting that I have practiced since childhood helped me a lot.

In the end, the blank sheet is the same as the camera viewfinder dial.

Only the time of reflection is different.

In drawing it can be hours, in photography even thousandths of a second.

This image was taken in Puglia, in the seaside village that was the place of my summer holidays for thirty years.

There are four old men sitting on a bench.

Behind them a plant in a pot.

The idea was to create a visual and symbolic link between them four and the four branches of the plant.

Almost a sort of circle of existence: from the vitality of the plant to the transience of old age.

The natural setting acts as a backdrop to the four old men – composition and metaphor.

 

At the time I did not know of Marc Riboud's photo which is one of my favorites, nor did I imagine that the idea of using photography as a metaphor would be important in my work.

Because photography uses the elements of images as words so it can describe or suggest.

Being able to catch a good poetic image every now and then means having accustomed the eye to see what is beyond that thin and gray veil that cloaks things.

Most of the time it is called habit.

The Wonder

Vittorio square. Rome, 22 June 2009

“Nothing is surprising when everything is an amazement: it is the state of childhood.”

Antoine Rivarol wrote in 1852.

I want to conclude with the photograph of this Filipino child.

Because I think that wonder is the engine of everything, not just photography.

The moment we stop wondering we start dying.

I titled this photograph “Astonished”.

In fact, I was as surprised as he was by his gaze, he seemed to me – and still seems to me – a little Martian who had landed in front of me.

I know that it is only the enthusiasm dictated by the writing of the moment, but I would almost say that in this image there is the secret of all my vision of photography. Of my whole life.

That capsule was hidden in the labyrinth of veins that leads from the heart to the eyes and mind.

It represents what I have never been able to be before and that I try to experience every breath of my little existence.

That of a Martian with a camera.

Italian version