About our Photo Exhibition

“In the Durga Temple”. Du' Parole. Rome, 5 May 2023. Foto: Arianna Speranza

The collective photographic exhibition “In the Temple of Durga – Colours, music, and spirituality: the Durga festival in the Hindu temple of Torpignattara in Rome”, which lasted ten days, at the Du'Parole pub in Centocelle, ended in recent days.

On display were twenty-two photographs, by ten photographers, the result of the Workshop I held in October last year, during one of the biggest and most heartfelt Hindu religious holidays which lasted four days.

About Durga and this celebration, I have already written.

Instead, I would like to draw some considerations on the days of the exhibition.

First of all, the great participation on the first day of opening with almost two hundred people.

Also in the following days, there was a lot of public, above all I was extremely pleased by the presence of the women of the temple Sarbojonin Hindu Puja Mondir, in a wonderful red sari, which was seen in printed photographs for the first time.

And here begins the first consideration.

Because it has always been a great regret of mine not to make it possible for the subjects of the photographs to be able to “see” each other.

It's not just an aesthetic factor, how beautiful an image or portrait can be and in any case, each of them makes extensive use of Facebook and they know my photographs well.

The discourse is different and focuses more on photography as a means and not as an end.

After all, I've always liked more of what photography makes possible, of its socio-anthropological meaning, than of the aesthetic comment of a photograph: I leave this to those who are better than me.

For me, photography has always been an invisible bridge, a spider that spins webs between people and emotions.

As Wittgenstein would perhaps say, the meaning of photography that I care most about is what falls into the empty space between the camera and the person portrayed, his image.

 

Already during my initial presentation at the opening, I saw the few Hindu women who had come very happy. The next day they returned in greater numbers, with children and flaming red.

But above all throughout the following day they thanked me in private for having explained and made known to the Italians who Durga was and for having put on a photographic exhibition on Bengali Hinduism in Rome – and I shouldn't be mistaken in saying that maybe it is the first what is being done on this subject.

I've been photographing them for over ten years now and it seemed like the time had come to involve some of my photographer friends in the workshop for one of the most beautiful festivals to see.

The Bengali Hindu community in Rome is a minority of over one hundred families, but it has grown in recent years, thanks also to the presence of their temples in the Torpignattara district itself.

After all, they are a minority in Bangladesh itself.

Therefore aiming the lenses at them also becomes a magical act, in a pure anthropological sense: it makes them visible, it makes them “appear” in the sense of an epiphany.

They come out of the doors of the temples to reveal themselves before the eyes of the public which is enraptured by the beauty of the saris, by the irrepressible joy of the smiles and dances, moved by their tears of religious transport, amazed by the richness of their rituals.

Here, their gratitude was truly touching for me: what gave me the greatest happiness of this exhibition.

The second point, on the other hand, concerns precisely who came to see it.

Because, as happens to me every time I bring someone to these ceremonies, to their temples, the same wonder and curiosity has returned.

With the usual consideration of the fact that in the end, this is not an inaccessible place.

On the contrary.

The idea that whoever enters, as unknown, could be a nuisance, falls away the moment you stand in front of the photos of their smiling faces or talk to one of the nine photographers who have accompanied me on this trip.

Prejudice is in our heads, not in the friends of the temple.

It is enough to cross – barefoot – the threshold of the temple that one is enraptured by the religious spirit, by their kindness, and by the music.

They are the first to want to be known, listened to, and seen.

Knowing that this little photographic exhibition of ours has allayed fears and lit the fuse of curiosity in someone is a success for us, more than the number of those who came in these ten days.

And, above all, the happiness of those who are not minorities was a success, because minorities are always like telescopes, just turn them around and everything changes, as Pirandello taught.

We were the alien minority within their social and religious body, yet they treated us like members of a family.

 

This also what Photography can do.

 

Thanks again to Sandro, Stefano, the two Massimo, Micol, Beatrice, Arianna, Alessandro and Gian Marco.

And thanks to the local Du' Parole for hosting us.

 

Italian version