My Double Threshold

A) Image

The Two Doors, 1980

Archival ink-jet print on Hahnemuhle Baryta photo rag, back mounted to Dibond, framed cm 200×130

B) Poem

Mental Space 1980

That which I represent
Is a visible image
Of my thought.

Of thought that sees
And recognizes itself
In that which already is.

Coincidence of position,
Physical and mental,
Of being and space.

Places of transition,
Inside and outside.

Complementary opposition
Of ubiquitous antagonists.

I unveil the world of the unseen.
I represent that which I do not know.

C) Essay

The Double Threshold of my Life, 2021

A direct analogical photograph of the passageway through two different doors: the former is Western- styled and rectangular, the latter arched, fashioned according to the Islamic tradition. Outside is the desert, inside is a sunny courtyard. Between these two doors resides a non-illuminated environment, unrecorded because of the film latitude and exposure constraints. The result is darkness, rendered visible by the surrounding light.

In the two visible areas of the image, inside and outside are simultaneously present and mutually exchangeable. What I could not record is at the core of my interrogation: that unseen, yet existing space, framed by the void generated by the two doors. The resulting image indicates the possibility of crossing, without which we cannot pass from one place to the other. Central to the matter is the experience, to which the image alludes, which is a metaphor of our existential condition: all life is a constant crossing of Thresholds.

This image has revealed to me a new approach, perceptual and conceptual to visible reality: the reflection of a mental image in the ‘given’ world, the encounter with a physical space, that becomes mental and experiential.

The Two Doors has been an initiatory work, the starting point of a process that continues nowadays along a path of exploration I could not have predicted had I not crossed those two different yet coexisting doors. Had I not entered that retinally visible but photographically unrecordable ‘black in between’. The awareness of having identified this phenomenological and existential blind spot has unveiled the path of my life: to be an artist.

Ever since that founding experience, I have seen myself responding to places of transitions, always in between, reflecting upon the concepts of limit, absence and elsewhere, and exploring the Threshold through metaphors of space, symbols of places, presence and absence of light.

I unveil a site’s potential to connect and separate simultaneous visions of interior and exterior that are a border overlooking two worlds, of which one could not exist without the other: everything that joins, separates.

My predilection for the zones of transition seems to indicate that Photography, considered as a symbolic language, can be thought of as a Threshold between what is visible and its multiple levels of interpretation: the point of balance between material and immaterial, real and possible.

Photography is a means and an interface, a two-dimensional plane where two opposite flows of information meet and mutually shape each other. One is endlessly streaming from the outer world in its thorough and raw state, and the other from our invisible inner world where images are formed, processed and brought to light. The image plane is an active Threshold placed between the Subject and the Real: Us and It.

Ultimately, I wonder, can the image be seen as the Threshold between reality in itself and what our though sees and visibly expresses?

Silvio Wolf 2021

Riflessioni

L’invisibile

Large Myhrab

Absence is the form of the most extraordinary symbolic model I have encountered: the Myhrab, the niche of prayer, is a pure direction of the gaze that indicates the most sacred place in the Islamic culture. It is not significant in itself, but because of the emptiness identified by its absence. Its architectural structure indicates a space that can be perceived alternately as concave or convex: in one case it is an absence, in the other an illusion, in both it actively represents a void made visible.

The Myhrab results from a double perception and a double negation: it is neither a place nor a thing, but a void that indicates an elsewhere. The Myhrab always points to a place other than itself, the target to which the eye aims: it is the indication of a direction, a latent place.

The Great Myhrab expresses a strong metaphorical value in regard to Photography: just as it indicates a double virtuality, the emptiness that points elsewhere, so Photography, every photograph, is, and is not, what it shows: we look and see through it, we see the image and we think of the object; the reality it alludes to is beyond the image, transmitted through it.

The Myhrab is a symbol able to offer man the power of ubiquity, because it allows the believer to be here and there at the same time. It is the place of virtuality, an act of faith, a real state of illusion and the idea of a total space of representation.

Silvio Wolf, 1989-2018

At the Met with Silvio Wolf, from Tintoretto to Baselitz

The Pillars of Truth

PDF

PART I

Encounter

Had I not lost my Polish Grandparents during the Second World War,
Had they not been persecuted Jews in Warsaw,
Had my Father found a single trace of their unspeakable destiny

In his after war research,
I wouldn’t have been obsessed seeking the traces
Of where and when they were murdered.

Had I not been morally compelled to honour their memory,
Tracking any information about the loss of the family ancestors I never met,
Had I not browsed the Internet looking for a truthful needle

In the dark haystack of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation,
I wouldn’t have connected the past with the present,
In this unpredictable realm of exactitude and chance.

Had they not been immersed
In the mysteriously manifold, sacred,
Realm of Reality,
Had History offered me

A reason, a meaning, a scrutable horizon
To the unfathomable experience they lived,
I wouldn’t have encountered

This photograph by Michael Nash,
Shot among the ruins of Warsaw in November 1946.

This picture tells one story and many stories.

It talks about the power of the image,
Our wish to exist and survive,
To be and resist time,
To imagine.

It is about shaping our existence
In spite of history, occurrences and death,
Being who we want, where we wish to be:
To reframe our lives.

It talks about Reality and make believe,
Fiction, imagination and Truth,
About Human being-ness.

This picture has been there for the last 73 years,
Only to be recognized Now,
Buried under the ruins of oblivion,
In the encompassing over-accumulation
Of infinite and simultaneously available information.

This image will be my
Pillar of Truth
Within the temple of all questions.

It is built by the photographer’s eye,
The architect of all that is Given,
To  stage one’s Life
The way he and she would have wanted it to be.

Everything is out there,
At our disposal,
To be selected, reflected and recognized,
Offered on the silver plate of Imagination,
Tendered when ready to be had.

As soon as the photograph is taken
The object is turned into an image,
The narrative born,
Stemmed from the ashes of Reality.

What necessarily existed,
What had to be there
For the photographer’s encounter,
Is tailored into a garment of the Real,
The semblance of a subjective thought

In the reflection of one’s mind-eye.

The Real is shaped into Reality,
The ‘thing in itself’cast into the image of the thing.

It is no longer and forever will be,
To exist in a new visual semblance:
The finite image of an infinite one.

Power,
Aspiration and desire,
The Human Theatre of Life

Is staged by a visual backdrop,
The screen of desire,
A window that obliterates the unbearable presence
Of the inalienable, Tangible Real.

Through the camera lens,
The constraint of the eye and the beholder’s viewpoint,
An Image is born.

The inception of a journey
In the desired time, envisioned space,
Memory, imagination:
In Life after Death.

Life within Death.

My Dear
Brucha Rojsa Piatkowska,
Hersz Laib Wolf,
Will an image,
A Word or a sound

Ever-present Us
With Your Presence,
Your Life?

Shall we ever know
What you lived:
Your Reality?

Michael Nash. A photographer uses his own backdrop to mask Poland’s World War II ruins while shooting a portrait of a woman in Warsaw, in November of 1946. Copyright: Michael Nash-AP Photo/ANSA

PART II

Reflection

Once upon a time, a man believed his eyes. He thought that what he could see existed, that things as such were precisely the way they appeared to be, and appearances were a door of perception that led to a truthful way to Reality:things as they actually were. For this reason, he made his choice, became a photographer and began to capture, depict and record his visual experience of things as if every picture that he took were a question he posed to Reality, and his images the optical answers to his retinal quest.

Strangely, the more he photographed, the more his pictures revealed aspects of things his eyes were not directly able to see, as if his images were pages of an unknown language he was learning to read, offering him access to what his eyes could only superficially grasp. He began to realize that the surface of all visible things was like a skin, the first and literal level of an all-encompassing and infinitely complex entity he referred to as Reality. He sensed that the depth of its manifold nature could disclose multiple levels of perception and meaning.

Through this practice, he was posing new questions, wondering whether he was looking at the actuality or the images of things. Could he only be seeing pictures formed in his mind and defined by his thought? Why were his photographs looking so increasingly different from what he thought he had seen? In the developmental process of his ever-evolving photographic language, a deep distance grew between the vision conveyed by his eye-sight and the language spoken by his pictures, until he realized the medium he most trusted had led his eyes to a naive temptation of truth, dissolving Reality into unfamiliar forms without a bond to the past.

The gap between the ‘irrefutable given’, without which no picture can be had, and its ever-expanding interpretive content had become so vast, that his work no longer represented any objects, but only its vague and at times indiscernible allusion.

He accepted the radical transformation of his photographer’s experience, convinced his photographs were acts of faith in Reality demanding to be reframed as part of a much larger scheme of interpretation. One day he saw himself writing:

“All my work stems from an experiential root, the recognition of a pre-existing element lived, appropriated and transformed into a metaphor for Reality. I feel that things in themselves are unreachable and unknowable, and I wonder: what if things already contained all their possible images? Since each of us looks at the same thing and sees it differently, couldn’t every image we produce be the projection of a corresponding internal one, of a thought that sees and recognizes itself in what already is, out there? Otherwise, how would we choose the very image that corresponds to us among the potentially infinite, existing, revealable ones?

I think that every photograph can be understood as a symbolic form of the mind, implemented through experience. I am struck by what I cannot directly see, and capture, process and accompany it towards the formation of its image. I observe where this process leads me, and ultimately, the form it takes to assume the ‘idea’ of the thing. It is a mystery how trivial things that belong to the every day and the undifferentiated may contain extraordinary levels of complexity that lay there where we are, exactly in front of us.

I am not interested in what binds us to the memory of the photographed events, nor the narrative produced, but the power of transformation in a new Reality: no longer the thing seen nor the one represented, but perhaps the summa and the overcoming of both. If men have created an image for everything and the sensible universe is entirely mapped, we no longer have to look at things, but see through them”.

Photography had taught him to see his practice as a way to simultaneously look towards the visible outer world and the lightless inner one, and see his picture as a plane of coincidence: the Threshold where these two different, yet tightly related worlds, coexist.

Eventually, he stopped looking around and seeking new subjects, and turned the lens towards his latest photograph: a completely black one. This image was the sum of all his previous negatives and files exposed onto a single sheet of photographic paper. It no longer retained the information of any individual pictures, so that the excessive amount of information had blackened the photosensitive surface, making his images retinally invisible.

This all-encompassing image of all the images reflected his presence in its black mirror-like surface at the moment he stood before it. Looking into this blind photograph, the only thing to be seen was this ghostly-reflected image of an invisible man, the metaphor for his overexposure to the images of the world and their constant, bulimic consumption. What was left to be photographed, he wondered, still unmatched by the presence of an existing image?

He titled his ultimate photograph Meditation: a blind gaze and a chance to see, a light negated and revealed and an absence from which a presence was born. His black-mirrored photograph was a meditation on Photography, the Subject and Reality at the same time.

This meta-photograph emerged from the ashes of the visible, at the end of any possible photographic representation, and inspired him to write the following words:

If

Reality ‘as it is’ is unattainable:
Present and distant, literal and obscure, evident and complex,
Multilayered and enigmatic,

If

Through our vision and expression

The things in themselves become things as they are for us:
Our visible ideas of what we call
Reality,

If

It is not about the way things are,
But the way we see them,

I wonder:

Isn’t our mind the special place where Reality
Becomes Exactly Who We Are?

If

Reality is the object of our thought:
What unity lies behind the diversity and complexity
Of the manifold appearances of Reality?

Is there a way to grasp such elusive unity
Through the windows that we open on Reality?

How can we allude to such unreachable wholeness
Through the limits of our languages?

If

The forms through which we express ourselves are mysterious,
Literal and symbolic at the same time,

If

These planes simultaneously exist
And one offers access to the other,
Can an Image tell me

Who I am?

Silvio Wolf, Meditation, 2009-2013. Black photograph face mounted to plexiglas, back mounted to back-lighting light box, 
100x100x25 cm
.

PART III

Doors

Doors of Perception
Are Gates to the Unknown.

Transitional sites,
Borders overlooking two worlds.

Inside and outside,
Places connect and divide.

Windows, Mirrors and Screens,
Acts of Faith in the Theatre of Life.

Existence and Illusion,
Subjective Reflections in the World of Objects.
Images are Optical Truths,
Thresholds of Reality.

Silvio Wolf, The Two Doors, 1980

Silvio Wolf, Lighthouse, 2009

Silvio Wolf, Grande Myhrab, 1989

Silvio Wolf, Canvas, 2006

Silvio Wolf, Apse, 2006

Silvio Wolf, Skylight 03, 2002

The New Values Photography
A Shared Way

For me IED was the path that led to teaching, a door that reopened to an academic world that I had not experienced since my university studies in Italy and those of photography and visual arts in England.

The use of photography, which quickly evolved into research and artistic endeavours, led me along the path of doing and thinking, along an itinerary that proved to be both analytical and experiential. Since I was offered the opportunity to teach more than 20 years ago, forcing me to study and systematise my thoughts to be able to better process and communicate them, for me photography has been enriched with new values, providing me with a mental and existential view that is deeper and more articulated.

Since then and with the advent of new technologies, photography has been trivialised, increasingly becoming a quotidian and gratuitous activity of instantaneity and oblivion, paradoxically losing one of the most precious things we can cultivate: the ability to “see”. While today everybody is able to take pictures, people are less able to visually interpret Reality, as if by photography’s becoming ubiquitous the language has imploded within the means, making itself invisible to the user.

To the contrary, I think of photography as a philosophical object, a symbolic form of thought implemented through experience, a metaphor of the Real. Precisely in the relationship between Reality and Individual, existence and experience, phenomenal objectivity and interpretive path, today I feel its great necessity and significance, increasingly defined as a discipline along a mysterious path that originates in the visible and the worthwhile leading to deep territories of the subject, of the symbolic and of expression of the self.

This is what I try to communicate to my students: the horizon upon which I summon them is the awareness of how much there is still to discover and know, how what we see and think we know is only a tiny part of the Real. For this I urge them to seek, so that they can find their own way to see and understand, to visually communicate the deepest part of themselves, the least known, the part that guides us, that governs inside, that allows us to implement higher forms of communication.

When I began to teach at IED the school was geared towards the professional model of artisan-photographer and the student population was almost exclusively male. Over time, the teaching of photography changed value and the students have increasingly perceived it as a tool for personal expression, and for some an artistic practice. While fewer want to become photographers, many perceive it as a valuable tool for research, and, for the most intellectually honest, for discovery.

A very significant phenomenon is that the student population approaching photography is increasingly feminine. In my experience this has meant more experimentation, willingness to challenge oneself, to experiment at greater risk, often “flying higher” in the sphere that the Anglo-Saxon world has called lens-based arts.

For me teaching has turned out to be a continuous learning process. I have had magical encounters with young travelling companions whose sensitivity and research I was honoured to accompany towards the discovery of their “own way”, men and women encountered in a profound, existential and symbolic area, where I discovered how teaching is first and foremost a form of communication that is not only verbal: perhaps the most important things are not conveyed through words.

Here are some milestones that define my experience as a teacher along the road shared with my travelling companions:

The Way

“Before man there is a particular way, his own: no attempt to imitate what has already been done and no claim that his own way excludes others from their ways: there is no single way, each must choose his own, and choosing means sacrifice.

[Our achievements] have their real value in that we bring them about in our own way and by our own efforts.

Every person born into the world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique … Every single man is a new thing in the world, and is called upon to fulfil his particularity in this world. Every man’s foremost task is the actualization of his unique … and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.

Everyone has in him something precious that is in no one else. But this precious something in a man is revealed to him only if he truly perceives his strongest feeling, his central wish, that in him which stirs his inmost being”.
(Martin Buber, in The Way of Man, ed. Qiqajon, Comunità di Bose, 1990)

The Question

Asking a question is more important than offering answers, because the answer is written in the question itself: only from the point of view from which it was asked will the answer be recognised, and this is always personal and heard in a special manner by the person who asked. There from where we question Reality will we receive the answers that await us.

Banal and Exceptional

All that we see and that happens – the banal, the trivial, the seemingly undifferentiated, the residual and the no longer visible – can be captured and experienced in an extraordinary way, symbolising them, interpreting them and learning to communicate through one’s own person, look and experience: our vision. 

“It’s not the world that is poor, it is we who are unable to call forth its riches”. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

The Choice

Every single photograph can be read as an individual choice, an act of recognition, a meaningful gesture extracted from the gratuitousness of everyday life and made unique and necessary to belong to this experience in the unrepeatable moment of individual choice: the divide between the possible and the completed act.

“We are given the opportunity to say everything, in every possible way, and we must say something, in a particular way”.
(Italo Calvino, in: Lezioni Americane, Oscar Mondadori, 1993)

The Limit

Each choice, each path taken necessarily precludes others. Of the endless possibilities offered to us by visible Reality we are forced to define those that belong to us. Only by placing limits can we fully exercise the power of our actions. Just as the frame defined by the edges of the viewfinder poses insurmountable limits on the view, any self-imposed limit is an impediment that empowers, producing freedom. That which we cannot do defines all that we can do, experience and convey.

The Point of View

From where we look we can see, from where we question Reality we will get our answers. The points of view are potentially infinite and we are called to define our own: this point is both physical and mental. We can change it until the last moment, then the image will be totally defined by the point of view from which it will be taken. From there, others will see the world through our eyes.

The Threshold

Photography can be thought of as the place of confluence of two streams, one coming from the inner world, from the unknowable depths of the mind and the psyche, and the other from the outside, from the unreachable existing Reality, unknowable except through the partiality of the means offered to us by our subjectivity. The image is the limit between the inner and the outer world, the point of union and separation, the threshold between two worlds in which one could not exist without the other: all that unites, separates.

The Image

Reading images, interpreting them, experiencing them, feeling where they resonate within. Can an image be considered “fundamental in one’s life”? And if so, what ascribes to it a value that is so highly symbolic? What do we profoundly call image and what natures can it assume: visual, memory, mental, smell, sound, performance? What is our image?

-“[People have] created an image of every thing”
(Wim Wenders: the angel Raphaela to the angel Cassiel in Faraway, So Close!)

Photography

The practice of teaching has made me aware that the current bulimic condition caused by the excessive consumption of images is producing a radical impoverishment of the visual experience and an incipient blindness. My educational programme aims to provide tools for searching for a way to slow down and listen to reflect on the value that the image has in our lives, where it resides in our experiential path, indicating ways that make it possible to shift attention beyond the time and place of the image to discover its non-literal value. It is a symbolic field that relates the physical and mental space, giving identity to both: the visible and the invisible are present together in the single Reality.

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible”
Oscar Wilde

Fireplace

Fireplace, 2016-2017
Inkjet UV print on glass, variable dimensions

Ogni mio lavoro nasce da una radice esperienziale, il riconoscimento d’un elemento che mi pre-esiste, vissuto, appropriato e trasformato in metafora del Reale. Avverto che le cose in sé sono inarrivabile e inconoscibile, e mi domando: se le cose già contenessero tutte le loro possibili immagini? Se ciascuno di noi guarda la stessa cosa e la vede diversamente, ogni immagine che produciamo non è forse la proiezione di un’immagine interna, del pensiero che vede e si riconosce in ciò che già è? Altrimenti come sceglieremmo quella che ci appartiene tra le infinite potenzialmente rivelabili?

Penso che ogni fotografia possa essere intesa come una forma simbolica della mente attuata attraverso l’esperienza. Mi colpisce ciò che non posso vedere distintamente: lo catturo, lo elaboro, accompagno l’immagine verso la sua formazione, vedo dove mi porta, che forma và assumendo l’idea della cosa. E’ misterioso come cose del tutto banali che appartengono al quotidiano e all’indifferenziato contengano straordinari livelli di complessità.

Così è nato il mio Fireplace: la canna fumaria d’un camino incontrato in un luogo e circostanza qualsiasi. Della fotografia non m’interessa ciò che ci lega alla memoria del soggetto né la narrazione che produce, ma il potere di presentazione e trasformazione in una nuova realtà, che non è più la cosa vista né quella rappresentata, ma forse la summa e il superamento di entrambe.

Gli uomini si sono creati un’immagine per ogni cosa, l’universo sensibile è interamente mappato: non dobbiamo più guardare le cose, ma vedere attraverso di esse.

Silvio Wolf, Dicembre 2017

The Truth of the Images

Film still from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, 1966. (Original photograph by Don McCullin)

…we know that beneath the image revealed there is another one, more faithful to reality, and that beneath there is another one, and again a new one under this last one, up to the true image of that absolute and mysterious reality that no one will ever see
Michelangelo Antonioni [1]

The last thing that counts in what the poet says is that it may also be true
Galileo Galilei

Michelangelo Antonioni’s seminal film Blow-Up anticipated some fundamental questions that are proving to be decisive in re-considering the nature and role of the photographic image as an umbilical cord with the Real and a medium between the subject and the object depicted. In its ability to represent and convey the mental and retinal vision of the photographer, its subjective and interpretive position in a man’s experience of the world and, ultimately, the Truth that it simultaneously hides and discloses, proves and belies, conceals and reveals, the photograph is fundamental to our comprehension of the world.

Blow Up depicts a single day in the life of Thomas, a glamorous 1960’s London fashion photographer, unfolding among a series of apparently disconnected and casual events: taking pictures in a flophouse and professional studio shootings, driving around town in a convertible Rolls Royce and looking for paraphernalia in an antiques shop, wandering in a nearby park taking pictures of pigeons, trees and a couple of lovers; meeting his book editor, visiting his neighbor and discussing his abstract paintings, playing with two aspiring young models in his studio, attending a rock concert, a drug-drenched party, fancy restaurants, playing with mimes on a tennis court ….

Surprisingly, the core event of the day reveals to be his voyeuristic chase of two lovers in a city park, the photographs he takes and the relation with the woman who is initially angry with Thomas for having violated their privacy only to visit him later, smoke pot, make love and give him a false phone number while requesting the restitution of his film. After she leaves, Thomas reviews the sequence of his black and white negatives, examining their enlargements and seeking insight into the woman’s apprehension, sensing he might have missed something contradicting his memory and understanding of the event. Following the timeline of his film and blowing up single shots and details, he begins to grasp a different story, this time through his pictures, as if a new narrative within the film unfolded in front of the photographer’s and the viewers’ eyes. Finally Thomas enlarges the detail of one image seemingly containing a possible solution to his morbid quest for an answer. Upon many successive enlargements Thomas suspects seeing in the hazy, grainy and enigmatic print the corpse of the man he had photographed with the woman, discovering another truth from what he had seen in the park. This crucial photograph that may contain evidence of a murder is abstract and unclear, dotted and elusive as one of his neighbor’s paintings. That same night Thomas returns without a camera to the location in the park and sees the corpse; when he returns in the morning with his camera, the corpse is gone. Back in his studio he discovers that all the pictures, except for the abstract one, have been stolen together with the negatives and contact sheet. The only trace left, perhaps ignored by the thief as meaningless, now bares the entire memory of the event and its secret: it is the key element to stand for the “truth” that revolves between -what he thought he had seen- and what -actually occurred-.

In Blow Up, the photographer exerts full power over his subjects when thoroughly staged  and  kept under his direct control, rewound, restrained and immobilized to perfection, only to loose grip and control of events when involved in a seemingly banal circumstance, an ordinary occurrence of his everyday life.

Through the experience of the photographer and the scrutiny of his enigmatic key shot, Antonioni seems to suggest the existence of an unbridgeable gap between looking and seeing, and likewise between seeing and thinking; his story expresses dramatically the enigma of seeing through a narrative which is literal (the facts depicted), metaphorical (the interpretation of images) and symbolic (the Truth of the pictures and of the event) at the same time, eliciting fundamental questions if we see the practice of photography as an experiential path of discovery and knowledge.

Do we only see what we think?

Through a single photograph the protagonist can see what he retinally did not see: how can this be? Was he blind while looking so intently, peeping and peering, glaring, observing, glancing and hawking like a hunter his prey? Was he the witness of a different story from what he sensed as a love one? Was his belief responsible for his vision, decisions and actions, only to be contradicted by a different story unfolding through the frames of the photographs?

Blow up reflects on the binding link that intertwines seeing and thinking, revealing the mystery of our glance as we ponder what the photographer actually saw. The limits of our vision, the constrains of the medium and ultimately the way we interpret Reality, dramatically determine our knowledge and understanding of the external world. Is Antonioni suggesting that we can only see what we think and our eye receives simultaneously the information from outside and inside, the existing world and our mind so that one could not be distinguished nor exist without the other? Therefore: on what actual elements can we base our comprehension and judgment of reality in order to exert our free will and be able to decide, chose and responsibly act?

Is our point of view responsible for what we actually see?

Voyaging alternately through the movie camera eye, the still camera eye and the photographer’s eye, we see how an apparently mundane event, a couple of lovers playing with each other seeking privacy in a park, may disclose an unexpected story, an obscure plot and possibly unfold the mystery that resides in the ordinary everyday. Once the event has occurred and disappeared from us, it is turned into memory and imagination; the photographer can no longer change his physical point of view, nor examine the raw material of reality from a different angle; yet he can change his mental perspective and position, reconsidering anew what he sees through the irrefutable timeline of his contact sheet, exploring a different film that ultimately leads him to a conclusion opposing his original premise.

Are Images Models of Reality?

Seeing is a creative act: we make up what we see more often than see what is actually there. Our glance only grasps highly reworked subjective fragments, shadows and reflections, “ideas” of the world: our understandings of what we call Reality.

We access and acknowledge Reality through images that are formed in our mind and result from the connection between two worlds: the manifold external one and our lightless inner one. This connection is fundamental. We do not see Reality in itself but only images that we make up of it and through these powerful, complex, mysterious mediators we see and we think. Mental images are the models of reality that we use; they are visual metaphors, allusions, interpretive vessels, and emanations.

These images are our true “lies that make us realize truth”[2], but how? We attribute meanings to images through our process of interpretation so that we can grasp what we see and what we think. Although the answer is always further away from our reach, the finite forms of our images may disclose multiple ways to read them and visually approach the infinite complexity of the Real. What we actually see is a mystery and the models we create as our images may tell and help to interpret the greater mystery that we are part of. In the words of Luigi Pirandello: “Man necessarily acts through forms, which are the appearances that he creates for himself, to which we ascribe value of reality”[3].

Can an interpretation be right and wrong at the same time?

Love and death seem to be two aspects of the same Reality that Thomas seeks to decipher through his key photograph: something doubtlessly happened in the park and his pictures prove that he was there. Could he possibly also have provoked the event? Albert Einstein stated that the understanding of a phenomenon observed is relative to the frame of reference of the observer; quantum physics maintains that the very presence of the observer changes the nature of the event. It is legitimate to wonder whether there would have been a murder if the photographer had not intervened on his stage of Reality, influencing and possibly determining the very course of the event. Was the woman the dead man’s lover or was she the accomplice to the murder or, possibly, both? Thomas is confronted with the deceptive truths of a photograph and the natures of the event that he eyewitnessed and ultimately with the meaning of what he saw, as the interpretation of this mysterious photograph is his alone.

How many realities can we attain through a single photograph?

The event that occurred was one: in how many different ways can we understand it if the same photograph can lead us to different meanings when observed from different angles? Are there actual events out there or do they result from subjective processes that turn them into stories and narratives? Had something not taken place, Thomas’ photograph could not have been taken; therefore there must be a link of necessity between Photography and Reality, yet the nature and meaning of the Image generated by their encounter need to be questioned. Inevitably we come to terms with the enigmatic nature of the Image as a threshold between these two active polarities, yet the Image is also a new self-defined object entirely determined by its language and narrative.

What is a photograph?

The more Thomas blows up his picture looking for the truth of the event depicted and the deeper he penetrates its secret, seeking the clarity not achieved while in the presence of the event, the more vague, grainy and elusive, less intelligible the picture becomes. When he finally sees and understands the presence of the corpse, the image has become like a pointillist painting: paradoxically now that the picture finally reveals the Truth of the event, the photographer is left to be the only person capable to read it. While his friend Bill needs to step away from his abstract painting to begin to see what he actually painted, the photographer has to get closer and closer to magnify the bits of information embedded in his picture, as if both Bill and Thomas were more in control of their imagination and desire than of external reality. Diane Arbus once stated that “a photograph is a secret about a secret: the more it tells you, the less you know”[4]. The power of a photograph often resides in what is not explicitly depicted, in the unclear areas, the accidents, outside the borders and within its structure, in the silence embedded in the secret of its language, in its interpretive depth.

Can Abstract Photography lead us to objective Reality?

The photographer blows up the image to see as deeply inside as he can, but trying to reveal its inner truth destroys its physical structure. Ultimately he is the only one able to decipher it: only he can see and imagine the corpse through the enigmatic structure of the silver grains.

The evidence of a murder, the most objective proof of what had happened is also the most abstract representation of the event. The photographer did not see the murder: he only photographed it. Why is the Truth more accessible through an abstract photograph rather than the man’s direct experience of Reality?

Can an Image reveal the Truth?

Does an Image contain its own truth or is there a superior one which we are part of?

Is the Truth in the eye of the beholder or does it exist out there, awaiting to be grasped? Does Reality contain already all its Truths and all its possible images? What vehicles do we have to access and reveal them? What Truth does a single image contain, if any, and how many others can be attributed: as many as can be thought, imagined, remembered, envisioned and wished? Can an Image reveal our Truth and ultimately tell us who we are?

[1] From a presentation that Michelangelo Antonioni made of Beyond the Clouds, the film that proved to be the last one of his life, 1995.
[2] Pablo Picasso, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies”, in The Arts, 1923, conversation with Marius de Zayas.
[3] Luigi Pirandello, in One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, novel, 1926.
[4] Diane Arbus, in Art Forum, A Biography by Patricia Bosworth, May 1971.

Thinking in Berlin

12 Projects for the final solution of the problem 

1)  “Do not buy from the Jews”

2)  The Italian consulate, half inhabited and half closed, on the edge of a land of no one, among the hills of debris and tablas played among the trees. Car seats, children uncatchable as herds of wild animals, mysterious figures behind the dunes. Machines with the doors open, prostitutes, pickup trucks, landfills, waste of all kinds.

3)  Sprigs of a tender green sprout on the dark trunk of a tree in the sculpture garden of the National Gallery. A tiny red spider walks over. Perhaps the smallest thing I can perceive across the city.

4)  The cells of the SS were located in the former artists’ studios of sculpture. Kids play, rabbits flee over the rubble of the buildings of the Gestapo. “In late Summer 1933 the Gestapo set-up its own prison (Hausgefängnis): twenty one-man cells in the lower section of the basement floor (artist’s studio rooms) of the former School of Industrial Arts and Crafts”.

5)  “They used to process people in Birkenau” First gassed, then shaved and gold being removed, then burned away”.

6)  The night: clear air. The dark masses of the Prussian museum architecture against

7)  the blue starry sky. No one around. The night city, semi-unknowable, softly crossable.

8)  The extermination of the Jews of Europe was decided in a villa in the trees, between yacht clubs and holiday homes. Four steel cables to hold up a pine tree in the garden. A gunshot is enough for a man.

9)  From the lowest apex I looked up. The dark sky, cloudy and moving. The strong wind. Everywhere traces of death systematically devised and implemented. Outside, charming villas and exuberant flowering chestnut trees.

10) Few times in my life I’ve been in places circumscribed by man of such beauty and charm.

11) A grand piano covered with a black shaped case. The black piano bench and the round stool of the page-turner. The instrument cannot play, light cannot enter.

12) Dreams.doc

a) The reunified Berlin is a large backyard with no walls, with many gates of which I never have all the keys. I have to go out with the car, but I cannot find all the keys. The same thing happens to me with the motorcycle. The continuing difficulty to cross these barriers, though there are no walls.

b) I’m in Berlin in a nightclub. It ‘s a Berlin as I can imagine from Milan. Not the place where I am, but its image as seen from the outside. Then at the entrance of a room in which is being celebrated a Jewish holiday, perhaps a birthday, but not a sacred rite. It’s a secular holiday. They don’t let me go in, in spite of the attempts, the explanations, the protests of belonging to the Jewish roots. They don’t let me enter.

c) Once again, a dream of exclusion from the Jewish community. Once again I am not part of it, I’m held outside. I get close but I cannot enter.

In Berlin sein 
I cannot enter the rooms of Judaism. The gallery next door to the synagogue is closed again. I pass by many times, but I always miss the magic combination of time + space + person to enter. It ‘s like in dreams.

Post script
I hope not to have them put to death for the second time.

The Factory of Paradiso

The first words:
Paradise, Treasure, Truth.

This is the beginning:
perhaps it already contains all that is to be.
I’m searching.

The Factory of Paradiso.
Light Echoes.

An idea of a journey.
The names, the field of research,
the gathering, the recognition.

To search for an implicit inner law
to correspond to,
that guides me and takes me far away.

The genesis of the project:
Formation, Threshold, Treasure, Elsewhere.

The Tree of Paradise is the map of the Treasure.

Truth

These are the words.

Architecture: the art of making the void inhabitable.

Life in direct light,
Experience in reflected light.

Formation:
The cornerstone,
The beginning, foundation and spark,
The origin of the whole project.

Totem,
sculpture and scripture of light,
material and color.

The building is constructed starting here.
Already contains the idea of the whole and the possible.
Physically I put it at the beginning.

To create the void in the full,
Inner and outer.

To reveal the hidden,
To present the elsewhere.

“The beyond that lies within”.

Words or images?
Words and images.

Truth:
A metaphysical principle.

Reality:
That which is,
Material of immanence,
To be experienced, represented,
Communicated.

Human reality
Is the form of an indivisible present
Set between two infinite times.

“…a medium in which inner and outer worlds converge…”

Raw: the pure luminous signal,
Degree zero of vision,
The almost invisible.

To write images,
To think with the eyes.

A narrow street
That leads deep inside,
Far away.

The truth of the image
In the image.
Its laws,
To respect,
to transcend the limits
Thanks to them.

It is dream material.

Photography:
Degree zero,
exegesis of the Real.
Elsewhere, infinite Present.
Writing of Time.

One never knows.

Each scan of the image
Is its translation in numbers.

Language,
The truth of words,
The truth of the image.

The word gives existence to nothingness.
The image reveals the real,
Interprets its shadow and absence,
Appearance and fullness.

The word image makes us see.

Language stops things,
Gives them truth.

Truth names and transcends Time.

Photography as judgment and choice,
Taking a position on time
By means of light.

Reality and appearance:
To bring things to light,
To bring into presence.

Form, experience,
Void, absence and elsewhere,
In the Real lies the reason of being.

In the evidence and the limit
The appearance of being.

To create the conditions:
The truth appears.

Photography:
Responses of the Real
to thought’s questioning.

The infinite and the frame:
The mind is the means,
The mind is the limit.

Levels of Reality.

Contingent and Infinite.

Interpretations of being.

The following text, a journal and a meditation on photography and the meaning of things, was written during the making of Paradiso.

Treasure

A) Place reflecting and opaque,
sparkling and impenetrable,
secret and inaccessible,
inviolable, passable,
container of the invisible,
static.

It conceals infinite secret stories:
the time of men, unspeakable stories,
past, private and profound.

It leads elsewhere
Through sensitive surfaces.

B) The place, the surfaces, the reflections
allude to a mystery I sense laden in the space,
three floors deep, 18 meters under ground.

C) Sealed to light,
inviolable, hermetic,
without exterior.
It conceals and protects the visible.
Makes invisible.

D) The deep heart of the project,
a generating cell,
the root from which everything springs.

E) The place of departure,
a station.
Inner and outer, binary.
Dull and reflecting,
opaque and transparent.

Neutral, gray, white and black,
anonymous and mirroring.
All inside absorbs the present,
hides the invisible.

The extremely near, the extremely far.
The here and the there.

Place without scale:
small/large,
solid/flying.

F) The Present:
the ampulla, a spacecraft,
an pristine laboratory.
The Elsewhere:
the Universe out there, beyond.
The visible Infinite.

G) Here:
a station of listening and departure.
There:
a possible path, the wait and the elsewhere.

G) Inner sounds:
organic membranes, percussion,
tribal rhythm, physical and primordial.
Outer sounds:
electromagnetic radiation,
radio emissions, light echoes.

H) The secret of the possible.
A thin skin shields us frrom the invisible.
A very subtle, shining threshold.

I) Finite, infinite.
The limit permits us to look beyond.
The limit beyond which we can look.

K) The experience of the journey.
Identification between body
(voyaging subject) and place.

Experience of the place,
identity of the subject.

L) Formation:
From absolute white, from light,
descent through color
to the threshold of absolute black.
Imagination of space
by fragments, flashes,
sharply blurred pulsations.

M) As soon as you see something,
you make an image of it.
The experience of seeing,
the vision of the image,
to see (is) to re-see.

N) Movement,
interpretation of time.

A dual perception,
access to forms of the possible.
Intuition and allusion.

O) To think with the eyes:
To sculpt time (Tarkovsky)
To write time (Wolf).

Experience of the Subject,
nature of the Place.

P) The motor is an idea of journey.
The descent
The entrance
The experience (vision)
The ascent
The exit.

A real journey,
a sensory experience,
a change.

A voyage through the experience of the place crossed.

Q) Light generates,
corrupts,
accompanies toward,
takes beyond,
connects and reassembles.

Splendors,
stellar glows,
echoes of light.

R) Progress in work:
Ship’s log of the Treasure Hunt

R1) Telecine

In the darkness of post-production
the film is like clay,
it senses and responds to fingers’ contact
on sensitive dry keys.

Light translated into numbers,
matter into data,
place into chromatic fragments.

To write, to write,
to write the times,
places and spaces,
the light,
peaks, saturation and contrasts.

Recordings of invisible events,
sensitive profane traces,
silent histograms,
reflexes, glows,
continuing mutations.

The judgment is expressed by the eyes alone,
very long instants,
instantaneous meditations.

To treat the image,
the human psyche,
the idea of the place.

The becoming,
the possible vision,
the finitely other.

R2) Paint

The treatment of the image:
to deprive reality of the imperfections
the eye doesn’t catch,
the mind doesn’t bear,
the film, therefore, doesn’t accept.

From the film-clay to the Real-sculpture.

All that I make visible, exists.
That which exists, is.
The possible condenses in the being

Disguise, conceal, show through, write, lighten, discover, reappear, define, vanish:
versions of “non-being”.

Like 21st-century scribes,
we write black to say white,
summoning light through darkness.

Muybridge unveiled the mystery of movement
thanks to the still image generated inside it,
modern warlock-photographer of instant time.

We, instead,
make the stillness of suspended time dynamic,
the fragments unearthed from the indistinct whole
of things thought and not spoken.

Intelligent visual deceptions,
projected in a river
crossed by 24 frames per second.

We breathe much more slowly
than the time captured by the eyes.

Art need not astonish,
but just let appear.
Manipulating clay and light
appears the essence,
the clear core of all problems.

In order for space
to appear equal to itself,
one must apply radical,
subtle, profound metamorphosis.

The deception is real:

X and Y the coordinates.
Z the crucial point
where the image implodes:
numerical sequences,
coded rewritings of space and time.

Make, Save, Gain, Restore, Cast, Effect, Replace, Repeat, Insert, Resolve, Stretch, Undo, Reset: strip down the image till it becomes a perfect body.

R3) Compositing, Editing

The code is inscribed,
bi-uniquely defined.

Each new reformulation
Maintains structure and secret intact.

Each new permutation
Recombines the parts,
complementary,
distinct and opposite.

Offspring of the same matrix,
place, experience,
genetic architecture.

Now the place reveals the secret.
The elsewhere is (in the) present,
happening now.

Marbles and metals generate thresholds.
Positive that interfaces with negative,
the skin of the place conducts and retains.

S) All is already written,
needs only recalculating.
Re-presentation.

All is potential,
needs only enactment.

Therefore all is connected:
we reveal ourselves through images.

Paradiso post scriptum

A) All the parts of the project, of the work, of the installation are connected, interrelated.
The work obeys and respects inner laws of the place.
B) Everything that appears is in the place and of the place.
D) The work as a whole forms a place of experience.
E) The connections are: above/below, inner/outer, static/dynamic, positive/negative.
F) The place is certain, specific, material (bank, caveau, church)
G) The work has to do with:
Material data: films, walls, doors, elevators, balconies…
Immaterial instances: light, color, threshold, elsewhere…
Architecture: art of making the void inhabitable, mediator between material and immaterial, between coexisting languages.
H) The place, and the circumstance:
Are necessary and specific.
Are opportunity, possibility, vehicle.
Are the outer, the otherness.
Are intact and transformed.
R) Material and dream, dream material.

Us

Home of the Unknown

Photographs are stable, still images,
Humans transient, impermanent entities.

Pictures are partial,
Representations elusive.
They cannot capture the actual, real self.

Yet images allude
To the essence we long,
The loss and the wholeness we strive for.

Are we unique,
Scattered, sparse fragments
Of a greater, unreachable image?

By will and experience,
By chance and through choice,
Is there a fulfillment to our irremissible quest?

For Us,
The principle,
The root and the problem,
The known and the unknown,
I wonder: who are

We.

Artist’s statement

The appearance of things is deceiving, their aspect elusive. What I see, the retinal image that I can grasp indicates only the first layer of what is visible, the skin of reality: the first level of its infinite complexity and the root of manifold visual interpretations. The phenomena that we witness are products of our consciousness, perception and projection: this clear illusion we call reality.

Photography bases its investigation on the physical data of reality, a codified transcription marked by traces of light shaped onto a fixed sensitive support. A photograph is a multilayered text to be read and deciphered, it may contain an inexhaustible reserve of understandings: all meanings are contained within its boundaries and present to be discovered and revealed. New interpretations may spring from the depth of the apparently flat surface of the image, rendered manifest through a hermeneutic process. Although we shall never grasp the true way things are, photography is an open source, an endlessly rich means of investigation and discovery.

I have worked with the medium of photography for a long time investigating manifold forms of reality from different points of view, aspects and positions. Along this quest I have developed an increasingly non-representational, almost abstract approach to transcend the first and essential layer of visible reality.

I wonder how the literal vision of photography can explore the depth of what cannot be seen directly; how this inherently limited medium, bound and dependent upon the appearance of what is manifest, may offer a way to trespass its boundaries and allude to what is beyond, elsewhere, perhaps invisibly there.

My exhibition US addresses these ideas and explores them through a subject that I’ve always found extremely problematic, if not almost prohibitive to approach: the human figure. The more I look at us, the more I wonder who we are. I have come to the conclusion that we are the problem and the solution to the problem, and the responsible act of pointing the camera towards us may offer a new insight and a different perspective to this endless quest.

The identity of my subjects is unclear and their names unknown; these photographs are visible forms of the questions I pose. I’m asking the audience to assume a fundamental role in completing my work, which I conceive as an open platform presented to the viewer. I sense that the answers are primarily embedded in the glance of the beholder, his active position and experience. Ultimately the picture is the medium between the Subject and the Other, the vessel to communicate in either direction: a threshold to trespass.

Abstraction

I have often wondered what the term abstract means in photography, a medium whose laws maintain an inseparable connection to the Real. I think it indicates the abstraction from the river of time, an immobile and suspended temporal fragment: an infinite, absolute present time. Nevertheless, the photographic medium is capable of indicating an abstract vision of the Real, as it alludes to non-retinal interpretations of the visible, super-perceptible forms, mental images that find their symbolic recognition in the Real.

The Horizons are scriptures of light self-generated during the process of loading the camera with film, beyond the consciousness and will of the photographer. They are perceptible manifestations of light inscribed on the photosensitive surface, before it records the first image taken by the photographer: they are images prior to time in latent form, already active before the encounter with the gaze and the experience of the photographer.

Every Horizon is a scrap of the photographic process, the initial segment of the film developed together with the entire strip of sensitive material, to reveal all the exposed images: its 36 true photographs.
This is an “off camera” process that happens “in camera”: a paradox that produces pre-photographic images, directly inscribed by light.

With the term Horizon I indicate the result of an act of appropriation; those films are not mine; my authorship lies in the recognition and attribution of meaning to the photographic object, not in the shot. My object is not the world but the language, the code of the visible world. I am interested in the latency and revelation of the image, its perceptible manifestation, the possibility of an apparition and the icon that arises from the intimate relationship among light, time and matter: the chance that occurs.

In my view, the Horizons are the last “true” photographs of the XX century. Everything has been photographed, Google tells us that the entire skin of the visible has been mapped, just as the whole chain of DNA has been written and encoded. Scientists say that only 4% of existing matter is visible and thus, I infer, can also be photographed, while the remaining 96% is classified in part as Dark Matter and in part with the even more enigmatic term of Dark Energy. These terms seem to imply a reality that exists but is not evident to media based on the use of light, and perhaps not even susceptible to representation through analytical thinking.

If the Horizons are the ultimate photographs of what visibly exists, its summation and reduction to the roots of language offer a more “objective” image of it, in which the object and the image of the object coincide, generating a model of reality that is the limit between light and its absence, between material and language. Language and subject seem to no longer require an object outside of themselves through which to establish a dialogue: it is the language that speaks (to us).

These works represent a borderline between photographic objectivity and abstraction, where the latter term doesn’t indicate a non-referential image, but pure interpretation of light revealed by photographic means. My will comes into play in the choice of how much white (excess of information) and how much black (absence of information) to include in the image, the positioning of the threshold: the line that separates the light from its absence, the latency from its manifestation and, ultimately, the power from the act.

The Horizon indicates the -here and now- while alluding to a possible elsewhere. Every Horizon is a genesis of light in time, a present here that alludes to a possible elsewhere. The Horizon is a visible threshold, the real and immaterial place that unites what it separates; I represent photographically a process of experience and transition: all life is a continuous crossing of thresholds.

Light

In my work light is actively the subject and the medium: I sense an inseparable link between process and form, language and reality: the one is the other.

In photographic terms, light implements a virtual separation, like that of a fresco from a wall, which allows me to materialize the elsewhere in an intended place. This generates a condition of ubiquity, an immaterial bond between real body and virtual body: the two exist simultaneously in a single, new space-time.

Installations

«What is the place?»
«The road. The home. The heart».
(Martin Buber, Gog e Magog, ed. Neri Pozza, 1999)

In my work places, occasions, circumstances have always been fundamental. Halfway through the 1980s, after years of experimentation with photography, I felt the need to emerge from the two-dimensional image, from the mere representation of places, to work in places, capturing, subtracting and re-placing, adding and modifying to give them symbolic meaning through processes of transformation and appropriation. These processes have brought me a strong sense of necessity and belonging, offering me identity and hospitality, allowing me to feel like a part of them.

I feel the need to construct the work starting with the place itself in which I have been asked to operate. I gather signs, traces, local references on which to intervene to design my project, to give it roots in that specific place, making it thus come to life for the occasion, for the circumstance, for that precise happening.

Every space is “good”, every place exists before my arrival, prior to my reconnaissance. Every place will continue to exist after my passage. Each place, once marked and granted symbolic force, represents a station of life, a stage of existence in a voyage that connects all the specificities encountered and that recognitions it has brought to life. Inner process and physical places of the world become inseparably linked. I feel the need to start from a completely external, pre-existing given. I go to the place, I gather, take things back to the studio, develop the project, construct new signs, then bring back metabolized material to its place of origin: the place is the event.

Every installation is a stage of a voyage, a station of a path that absorbs and transforms the space into a place, whose identity is offered to the experience of the individual through new relationships and paths of meaning.

All Art Has Been Contemporary

All art has been contemporary è un opera di Maurizio Nannucci: una scrittura di luce. Essa ha ispirato la mia riflessione attorno alla domanda rivoltami da Roberta Valtorta: “E’ contemporanea la fotografia?”

Forse Nannucci ha già risposto alla domanda attraverso questo truismo, purché si assuma la Fotografia in quanto pratica artistica: questa è secondo me la questione centrale da cui ogni altra risposta deriva.

Dunque la mia prima risposta è: sì, la Fotografia è sempre stata contemporanea.

1) Forse gli unici ad essersene accorti con tanto ritardo sono stati proprio i fotografi, una comunità in perenne equilibrio tra linguaggi altrui, ma spesso poco cosciente dei propri, pervasa da un senso d’inferiorità e d’inadeguatezza nei confronti di linguaggi considerati talvolta più nobili del loro. Questa comunità è stata continuamente scavalcata da altre e più agguerrite tribù: i chimici, che hanno inventato la fotografia, i fisici, che l’hanno sviluppata per verificare le proprie intuizioni del mondo, gli informatici, che l’hanno smaterializzata e trasformata in numeri, i semiologi, che l’hanno utilizzata per riflettere sui segni e sui loro referenti, e infine la più radicale ed agguerrita, quella degli artisti, grandi padri e onnivori consumatori di linguaggi, che l’hanno contaminata, trasgredita, sovvertita e spesso abbandonata senza troppi problemi.

2) Ecco una seconda questione importante:

Perché l’arte e la Fotografia per così tanto tempo non si sono identificate? Perché la Fotografia così a lungo ha guardato solo a se stessa pensandosi meno nobile e meno fiera dell’Arte, quasi ne fosse una sua lontana parente? Perché s’è dunque scavata una nicchia d’autoreferenzialità? Cosa le è mancato?
Da questo stato di subalternità e separatezza deriva un’ulteriore questione importante:

3) Quando diciamo Fotografia, quale Fotografia nominiamo?

La fotografia s’è rivolta sin dalla sua nascita al Reale: l’ha registrato, studiato, documentato, rappresentato, copiato, testimoniato, denunciato, ricordato, negato, simulato, ridefinito, simbolizzato e messo in codice fino a identificarsi e confondersi a tal punto con esso da divenirne il sinonimo per antonomasia, la sacerdotessa d’ogni sua espressione e rappresentazione sensibile, s’è fatta Icona del Reale.

Non esiste dunque la Fotografia, ma esistono molte Fotografie. Essa è ormai ricca di generi, di modi e di tradizioni, d’identità e di stili. La Fotografia non può più essere affrontata – in toto – come se si ripartisse da zero ogni volta che la si nomina, come se fosse un’entità unica, a maggior ragione oggi che sono in corso cambiamenti epocali del suo linguaggio e dei suoi statuti, della sua tecnica e della sua identità, del suo ruolo sociale e del suo mercato.

4) Questi cambiamenti vanno di pari passo con gli enormi mutamenti oggi in atto nel mondo dell’informazione e della comunicazione e più in generale nel modo stesso di assegnare senso alle manifestazioni del Reale. E’ un processo d’enormi proporzioni, paragonabile alla crisi che l’apparire della Fotografia produsse nell’ancor solido mondo della pittura. Allora furono la figura professionale del pittore ed il suo ruolo sociale ad entrare profondamente in crisi; fu una crisi di valori, di prassi e di statuti che si ripercosse non solo sul lavoro dei pittori e sugli oggetti del linguaggio ma, cosa assai più importante, sulla loro stessa messa in codice della realtà. Fu una crisi lunga e complessa che produsse una feconda esperienza di morte, foriera d’un grande rinnovamento che costrinse gli artisti ad interrogarsi sulla propria visione della realtà, ricercandone e in fine trovandone di radicalmente nuove. Paradossalmente fu proprio la verosimiglianza fotografica, cioè la straordinaria e per quei tempi immediata aderenza dell’immagine fotografica al suo referente mondano, fu la scrittura stessa della Fotografia a sgravare la pittura dall’ingombrante fardello che si portava appresso da secoli: il cordone ombelicale della dura rappresentazione del reale, rescisso il quale si dischiuse quell’immenso orizzonte che condusse alla visione cosiddetta astratta della realtà.

5) A quasi due secoli dalla sua nascita, la Fotografia si trova oggi in una situazione analoga a quella descritta. Incalzata e scavalcata, esautorata di ruoli e di funzioni, la grande madre di tutti i mezzi e processi non manuali di produzione dell’immagine sta sperimentando anch’essa una profonda e feconda esperienza di morte. I processi digitali, l’immagine elettronica e di sintesi, la multi-medialità e la realtà virtuale, col loro potere di calcolare e riscrivere l’immagine secondo ordini e strategie infinitamente arbitrarie e complesse, stanno dissolvendo -nei fatti- gli statuti storici della Fotografia, quelli che essa fin dalla sua nascita ha assunto come propri ed ai quali si è affidata per affermare la propria esistenza e la propria verità. Intendo i codici della fotografia analogica, quelli propri del suo DNA linguistico:

– La certificazione della realtà.

Che ciò che vedo nell’immagine sia anche esistito, che sia anche stato. Che al presente della rappresentazione corrisponda necessariamente un passato dell’esperienza. Che la cosa descritta sia accaduta.

– L’unità di spazio e di tempo.

Che il fotografo e la cosa fotografata si siano trovati nello stesso luogo nello stesso momento, l’uno in presenza dell’altra. Che le cose si siano trovate là dove sono state fotografate e che sia quindi esistito un tempo in cui gli eventi raffigurati siano anche accaduti: un tempo condiviso dal fotografo e dal suo soggetto.

– L’esperienza.

Che io abbia visto, vissuto, scelto e fotografato: abbia fatto esperienza della realtà rappresentata. Che la fotografia parli per bocca del fotografo: che sia segno e testimonianza assieme, indichi l’Io dell’autore.

Simbolicamente: che ad un qui presente corrisponda un altrove passato.

6) Ecco dunque una prima risposta alla nostra interrogazione iniziale: la Fotografia contemporanea è diventata molto brava a mostrarci ciò che non è ancora accaduto e ciò che potrebbe accadere, a darci evidenza del futuro e del possibile, a mostrarci luoghi senza altrove e presenti senza più un passato, mentre sta perdendo il suo potere storico sulla rappresentazione consolidata dello spazio e del tempo.

L’essenza irriducibile del linguaggio fotografico non sembra più essere il noema Barthiano è stato, ma piuttosto il come se espresso dalle più avanzate ricerche linguistiche. Ci confrontiamo oggi con immagini indifferenti, potenzialmente in grado di confermare o di smentire, vere e false assieme. Arbitro di questa scelta non è più né il soggetto delle immagini, né l’etica di chi le crea, ma piuttosto il pensiero e l’atteggiamento di chi vi si confronta, e soprattutto l’ambiente in cui sono fruite.

7) I processi socialmente significativi, ciò che è veramente in grado di generare senso, avvengono sempre più spesso in luoghi non più visibili, né rappresentabili fotograficamente: in luoghi non più raggiunti dalla luce. Sappiamo che la fotografia ha sempre avuto bisogno di luce per materializzarsi e a sua volta la luce di superfici sensibili sulle quali riflettersi prima di raggiungere la nostra retina o di penetrare all’interno del dispositivo ottico, fisico e chimico per trasformarsi in segni fotografici. I processi comunicativi e decisionali, lo spostamento d’informazioni e dati, la produzione di senso avvengono ora all’interno di reti, circuiti e sistemi non più necessariamente visibili all’occhio umano: come potrà la Fotografia rappresentare luoghi e processi non più visibili? Ciò che noi vediamo è spesso solo l’output, la fine d’un processo, la sua ricaduta materiale, la crisalide da cui l’insetto perfetto è già volato via: del bruco ci resta solo la memoria, della crisalide, la fotografia, non sappiamo più cosa farcene. L’insetto perfetto vola libero lungo le fibre ottiche nell’infinitamente lontano o nell’infinitamente piccolo, a distanze siderali dalla terra o negli irrappresentabili spazi delle particelle subatomiche; vola ovunque nella rete delle reti, là dove risiedono e sono accessibili un numero virtualmente infinito d’immagini del mondo. Sono immagini che rappresentano tutto e il contrario di tutto, mediante le quali possiamo ricombinare infiniti racconti, narrare storie d’ogni genere, per qualsiasi cultura ed ogni finalità: é un arcipelago di linguaggi che ci consente d’essere testimoni assenti, ubiqui e simultanei.

8) Siamo ormai giunti di fronte alle immagini d’uno specchio del mondo in grado di ricombinare i frammenti delle sue infinite immagini riflesse e di restituirceli nella forma di pure Icone della Luce e del Tempo. Siamo i fotografi d’una realtà che è potenzialmente già immagine e possiamo ricodificare ciò che è già in codice senza confrontarci con la durezza del reale e in fondo senza doverne più necessariamente far parte: la realtà delle immagini è già infinitamente ricca e tutto -o quasi- ci sembra possibile.

9) Se possiamo partire da realtà di seconda, di terza, d’ennesima generazione, cosa ce ne faremo più delle nostre vecchie o contemporanee macchine fotografiche? L’antico gesto d’impugnarle assomiglia sempre più a quello del brandire una sorta di clava del XX Secolo, un oggetto anacronistico, fuori misura ed inappropriato a rappresentare un presente che s’è fatto cangiante, discontinuo, molteplice e frantumato in infiniti presenti non più riducibili all’esperienza del singolo individuo in un singolo luogo, né tanto meno a quella d’un singolo sistema occhio-mano-corpo.

10) Ecco allora una nuova risposta possibile alla domanda iniziale: la Fotografia contemporanea sta diventando campione nel mostrarci il banale, il quotidiano, l’indifferente. Il fotografo sembra più a suo agio nell’impugnare una leggera retina con la quale rivolgersi a delicate farfalle che assumono via via le forme di lievi rappresentazioni introspettive, mutamenti di stati d’animo, rapporti interpersonali, incontri minimi, minimi scambi, scene della vita quotidiana: di quel vissuto che appartiene all’immateriale sfera della soggettività.

Così come la rete gettata dal pescatore è in grado di riportare a galla ciò che scorre nel fiume in cui è immersa, così la nostra rete fotografica può cogliere randomaticamente nel grande fiume del tempo. Tutto il pescato è ridotto ad equivalenti presenze delle quali nessuna di per sé è più significativa: si tratta d’un fiume indifferenziato di senso perché proprio il fotografo, l’attore del gesto, il pescatore del fiume del tempo pare come smarrito ed incapace di dar senso a ciò che vede e raccoglie.

11) Il fotografo non riesce più ad essere “là dove le cose accadono”, sulla “prima linea” del mondo, né a denunciare né a criticare, né ad offrire alla comunicazione il senso del reale: a nominare il presente. E’ come se al fotografo stesse oggi sfuggendo di mano il tempo: il cardine del suo linguaggio, paradossalmente proprio ciò di cui è stato per anni l’incontrastato maestro: l’artefice dell’infinito presente.

12) In assenza d’un pensiero forte e capace d’identificare il reale la Fotografia contemporanea si concentra su modelli della realtà. Ci mostra scene, situazioni, eventi che sembrano reali o verosimili. I fotografi narrano storie di cui sono gli scrittori, i registi e talvolta gli interpreti. Se la realtà sfugge di mano e si rende invisibile, ecco che il fotografo ricrea la propria attraverso le particelle d’un mondo dove tutto è sotto controllo, la messa in codice è pianificabile come nel gabinetto d’uno scienziato, la realtà fa ciò che lui le detta, perché assomiglia alle sue aspettative, la riconosce, è il modello delle sue nostalgie. Dopo aver preteso per quasi due secoli di poterle fare da padre semplicemente donandole il suo nome, oggi il fotografo comincia ad esserne anche un po’ madre: la procrea, la alimenta e la cresce, la protegge e la ospita dentro la sua casa, il suo studio e il suo mondo creando la sua icona nel dominio del possibile.

13) Altri fotografi hanno gestito il proprio smarrimento di senso del mondo visibile cercando di catalogare in modo oggettivo la realtà che sta scomparendo. E’ quella Fotografia che ha fatto dell’approccio duro e frontale la mappa e il testamento assieme della realtà industriale e sociale del XX secolo, concentrandosi s’una pelle del mondo che è divenuta la dura crosta della realtà, fotografando le cose prima della loro scomparsa, come in una catalogazione a futura memoria.

14) Una delle più grandi palestre della contemporaneità nella quale i fotografi hanno praticato i propri esercizi di stile e coltivato la crescente nostalgia del reale, è quella del paesaggio. Ormai incapaci di ritrovare un centro al suo interno l’hanno trasformato in una sorta di Disneyland dello sguardo, forzandolo a diventare un quadro fotografico colorato, sfocato e modificato a loro piacimento, nuova finestra di contemplazione d’una realtà indifferenziata e distante. Meglio dunque concentrare lo sguardo ed il proprio sentire sulle fotografie stesse, rese nuovi oggetti del mondo: foto belle, suadenti, colorate, inclinate, sfocate, basculate, riflesse, invertite, grandi, enormi, monumentali. Le nuove icone possono esistere senza fardelli di tipo morale nei confronti d’una realtà muta ed assente.

15) La fotografia analogica si scopre contemporanea proprio là dove appare superata e per certi versi obsoleta: nel confronto con l’immagine digitale. E’ importante ricordare che la Fotografia è la grande madre di tutte le tecniche non manuali di produzione dell’immagine e notare anche che l’estetica di gran parte delle immagini digitali finora prodotte è ancora ampiamente di derivazione fotografica (prospettiva, posizionamento della luce, riflessi, punto di vista, natura delle superfici). Particolarmente le immagini sintetiche, quelle prodotte all’interno del mezzo mediante computo numerico e modellizzazione, cioè che ci consentono di vedere immagini d’oggetti reali senza che le loro superfici siano state investite dalla luce del sole, pagano pegno alla Fotografia quando devono darsi status, dignità e valore. Per essere accreditate alla Corte del Reale affinché ad esse si creda, hanno bisogno di sembrare fotografie, di mimare la speciale messa in codice della fotografia. Paradossalmente i mezzi in grado di spingere al di là i limiti d’una visione consolidata, stereotipata e ormai sospetta della realtà, proprio gli strumenti del nuovo si rifanno ai valori formali della Fotografia tradizionale per essere suffragati dal più ampio consenso. Sembra dunque ripetersi il destino dei fotografi dell’800, che ricercavano nell’estetica della pittura quella legittimazione che la scarsa tradizione e l’acerbo linguaggio d’allora non potevano offrire.

Infine ancora tre notazioni attorno a questioni che rendono la Fotografia quanto mai “contemporanea”:

A) Il mercato.

Tanto più la fotografia si approssima alla sua morte come oggetto socialmente utile, atto a fornire e trasmettere informazioni e a certificate dati della realtà, tanto più perde terreno nelle strategie di comunicazione, nell’uso “duro e diretto”, tanto più acquista valore come pura immagine, nuova icona autoreferenziale. Diventa oggetto di contemplazione, feticcio da collezione: opera per il mercato dell’arte.

I nuovi media aiutano oggi la Fotografia ad assomigliare sempre di più alla pittura, nel senso che la Fotografia può raffigurare qualsiasi cosa e in qualsiasi modo essa creda giusto farlo, liberata dagli obblighi cui la sua sudditanza psicologica, prima ancora che linguistica, l’avevano costretta. I mezzi elettronici e multimediali stanno riscattando la Fotografia da molte sue servitù storiche, spingendola velocemente verso la propria morte sociale, ma offrendole finalmente accesso alle arti belle.

B) Il Museo.

Due interrogazioni: costituire oggi un Museo della Fotografia, pur rappresentando di per sé un’iniziativa utile e necessaria, non rischia però di dar forma ad una nicchia disciplinare, ad un ghetto del linguaggio?

Attribuendo la propria identità ad un unico linguaggio, il Museo non nega forse la grande ricchezza presente nell’Arte contemporanea anche grazie all’uso d’una pluralità di linguaggi finalmente liberi da gerarchie?

C) La scuola

Cosa si prefiggono d’insegnare oggi le scuole di fotografia in una situazione così complessa di transizione e di cambiamento? Quale figura professionale sanno indicare come modello? Quale nuova idea di Fotografia sono in grado di proporre a studenti che si avvicinano allo studio di questa ormai storica disciplina con un’idea spesso datata e mutuata più dalla mitologia che dalla sua realtà attuale?

Peter, il fotografo di successo ritratto da Michelangelo Antonioni in Blow up 37 anni fa viveva già dentro di sé, esistenziale, la crisi del soggetto-fotografo e la fine dell’ottimistico potere di lettura del reale attraverso il suo principesco strumento. Egli crede di vedere, pensa di aver visto; attraverso le sue immagini si costruisce storie, certezze e modelli cui credere ma che la realtà s’incarica di smentire, oppure semplicemente non confermare.

La crisi del suo rapporto con il mezzo ed il linguaggio di cui è pubblicamente un maestro, coincidono con quelle della sua identità personale profonda. Egli finisce per identificarsi, far parte e credere solo ad una realtà che si è trasformata in finzione e rappresentazione, di cui lui diventa attore e spettatore assieme: Peter non ha il problema d’informare, né quello di comunicare, ma forse solo quello di essere. Il film sospende il giudizio, caricando di valore simbolico l’immagine come solo l’artista può fare: nel mistero del tempo presente. Oggi, finalmente, la Fotografia può trovare i modi per dirsi contemporanea.

L’ultima cosa che importa in ciò che dice il poeta, è che ciò che dice sia vero. (G.Galilei)

Sh’Ma Magazine