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History of Photography

ISSN: 0308-7298 (Print) 2150-7295 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20

Visions of Italy

Ennery Taramelli

To cite this article: Ennery Taramelli (2000) Visions of Italy, History of Photography, 24:3,
218-222, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2000.10443406

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2000.10443406

Published online: 19 Jan 2015.

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Giovanni Chiaramonte

albums retrace the footsteps of Judeo-Christian salvation from the because, eliminating all differences of scale in the cosmos, it finally
Pyramids and Sinai towards Jerusalem and Damascus. In the second places within reach of the human eye everything, from the
half of the nineteenth cenrury Felice Beato, Samuel Bourne, and infinitely small to the infinitely large, from the infinitely distant to
John Thomson became the witnesses and custodians of the the infmitely close.
splendour of the various civilizations of India, China, and Japan. At By bringing into focus the other and elsewhere confronting
the same time, Timothy O'Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Man, photography unveils also the other and elsewhere inside of
Carleton Watkins presented themselves as the discoverers and frrst him, that infinite distance which separates his self from his own
narrators of the splendour of nature of the American West. In the destiny. As Wallace Stevens observed: 'It is the man in thee that
extraordinary photographic era of the early twentieth century, lives, not he. He is the image, the second, the unreal, the
artists such as Weston, Strand, and Adams, and photojournalists abstraction .... He is not himself'. Ghirri's journey through the
such as Cartier-Bresson, Kertesz, and Bischof made Earth the rooms ofhis own home and the known and loved roads ofhis land
shared home of all men because, as Diirrenmatt writes, of origin, like my ceaseless pilgrimage through the cities of the
'photography transforms our planet into a homeland for us all, world, is the necessary journey of one who has seen living Man
because a homeland is only that which we can represent as an reflected in the mirror of the Infinite, and seeks, photograph by
image'. photograph, to embody the first, real, concrete image of himsel(
Precisely because the true dwelling place of humankind is the (trans. Belinda McKay)
image that we construct of ourselves and of the world, from
moment to moment in the becoming of rime, the purposeless
wandering of Robert Frank in The Americans marks the end of an
epoch ofjourneys and at the same time the troubled beginning of a
new awareness of vision. Frank's work, published in Italy in 1958, Visions of Italy
expressed the painful and at times desperate awareness that through
the image the West has made the world the home of everyone, but Landscape and Art Photography
has made it uninhabitable - or worse, non-existent, because our
images have by now become incapable of mirroring and contem- Ennery Taramelli
plating the infinite and eternal 'effigy' of ourselves residing in God
in its limited and mortal finiteness. In their senseless multiplication In 1984, an exhibition and a book entitled Ita/ianjoumey signalled
ad infinitum and their attempt to replace reality, images now indicate the beginning of the advenrure of contemporary Italian
only the irremediable shattering of our human image into the photography. Notwithstanding the title's echoes of Goethe, the
insignificance and informal dissolution of nothingness. Allen images shown in the exhibition and collected in part in the book
Ginsberg observes in Hydrogen jukebox (1990) that, 'recent history is revealed the horizon of a landscape that undoubtedly no longer
the record of a vast conspiracy to impose a single level of possessed the- charm of a natural environment as uncontaminate-d as
mechanical consciousness on humankind and to exterminate all on the first day of creation, which had enchanted visitors on the
manifestations of that precious part of sensibility that the individual Grand Tour. Instead, the journey of this photographic eye
shares with his Creator. The suppression of contemplative indivi- uncovered a landscape where the signs of narure and history
duality is almost complete'. In his poem 'Howl', Ginsberg can do coexisted with the great signs of urban artifice.
nothing but declare: 'I saw the best minds of my generation A brief note, printed on the back cover of the book, explained
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . . rejected yet the poetic reasons behind this journey from the North to the South
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his of contemporary Italy:
naked and endless head'. Italian journey is born out of the need to undertake a journey
Out of reflection on the theme of the infinite and its represen- into the new Italian photography, and, in particular, to see
tation through the lens, the instrument in which the sign of the how a generation of photographe-rs has rurned its gaze- onto
infinite is impressed like a necessary and unavoidable destiny, was the reality and the landscape that surrounds us. The works of
born that new awareness which has made the journey of these artists tum the attention of photography onto the
photography still possible for artists of the generation to which everyday culrure of contemporary Italy. In these photographs
Ghirri and I belong and above all made the stupendous and men speak less through their countenances and more through
marvellous miracle of seeing still possible. The act of photographing the objects that surround them and the environme-nt in which
the reality of the world in all its dimensions, physical and spiritual, they live. The intention is to recompose the image of a place,
inner and outer, is in fact still possible only if the image fLXed both anthropological and geographical. The journey is thus a
forever in the perspective space of the lens and the instantaneous quest and an attempt to activate- a form of knowledge that is
time of the shutter prefJ.gUres the immortal destiny of the image not a sterile scientific category, but an advenrure in thought
represented in it. Otherwise, as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag and vision.
rightly emphasize, one is capsized into the worst of lies, because
with the illusory permanence of its still image it conceals every The author of this poetic programme was Luigi Ghirri, the spokes-
finite representation in an infmite that coincides with nothing. This person of a new generation of photographers who seemed able to
is the basic meaning and value of the act of photography; and in the respond to the challenge of a vision that had the potential to give
loss of this meaning even the simple act of focusing becomes form to the new landscape of contemporaneity.
impossible because, as Jean Baudrillard writes, 'in the absence of a Olivo Barbieri, then at the beginning of his photographic
value judgement it is value that is set on fire', reducing the world career, recalls the experience ofltalian journey:
and man to ashes. The exhibition gave us the opportunity to meet each other.
The infinite, in my experience and Ghirri's, is the horizon line We were unite-d in our desire to think up a new way of doing
between the earth and the sky that reveals the meaning ofboth. It is photography. In putting together the exhibition, we realized
exactly located where Man is at home, because only there is the that almost all of us had eliminated the human figure from the
inexhaustible and endless relationship between his self and the landscape. It was a more or less conscious reaction to the
world completed. The lens, born out of this relationship, is the photojournalism of the 1970s, which meant black and white
revealer and therefore the instrument of the infinite, because it photographs and the obsessive presence of human faces and
always shows the other and the elsewhere which confront us. The figures.
other and the elsewhere are and will always be an unthought and The choice of colour was an intellectual gesture: 'Colour
unthinkable event - infinite in fact. For this reason, the lens is the photography', writes Ghirri, 'because the world is in colour ... '
only instrument that can represent all the dimensions of the real And another intellectual gesrure was the choice of a landscape that

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Visions if Italy

coincides with the discovery of a 'real Italy' located in 'lesser Italy'. with nature; increasingly, we see with the eyes of others ....
Ghirri elaborates: 'By "new landscape" I did not mean a change of One ends up renouncing one's own sight, which seems so
backdrop, or a simplistic gesture of turning attention from one impoverished in relation to that elaborated by thousands of
reality to another.. .'. It was, rather, a matter of 'responding to the visual communication specialists. Little by little, the world is
challenge of contemporaneity and the present'. no longer sky, earth, fire and water: it is printed paper,
These voyeurs/voyagers rejected monumental itineraries and £mtasms evoked by ever more perfect and persuasive
traffic networks - motorways and viaducts - and ventured into a machines.
landscape that has nothing to do with the postcard oleography of
the 'Bel Paese', or with the deceptive scenarios of the cinematic To avert the gaze from the opacity of a world that has entirely
vertigo of the modem. They turned to a less grand Italy: asphalted slipped into the role of Image was to become a constant in Italian
street~ off the beaten track, rural pathways, anonymous views of landscape photography. To reconnect vision to its phenomenolo-
large and small cities and their outskirts - slices of everyday life gical dimension came to mean defining the rationale of the artifice
found beyond the walls which encircle the historic cities. Centred called photography, not only in its linguistic and perceptive
and fixed in the photographic frame, these places form the horizon valences, but according to modalities that unity the act of seeing
of a landscape that lives in a dimension of'suspended time'. Figures, with the apport of thought, time and memory. This reconfirms the
places and objects are there, in the timeless presence of a present necessity of photography - inherent in the reasons for its
that is truly out of place. invention -· to fix perceptive gestures by acting on the real and
The almost total elimination of the human figure contributes returning it in a form modified by mental analysis and synthesis.
to the creation of this temporal and spatial dimension of The choice oflandscape, fur from presenting itself as a neutral
'elsewhere'. Empty and deserted, these images give form to a vision field of vision, becomes the place par exrrllenre for performing
of the world that recalls the remote past of the origins of thoughts and mental gazes that locate the possibility of a new
photography, when long exposure times eliminated all signs of life 'invention' of the real in reflection on the linguistic mechanisms of
and movement from the image, allowing only fixed and inanimate photography. Accordingly, in Italian Joumey Ghirri defined the
objects to be represented. This sense of the image is elucidated by objective of landscape as 'to recompose the intage of a place, both
Walter Benjamin's comment on Eugene Atgct's photography of anthropological and existential'. His definition provides a valid
Paris in the early 1900s: 'These places arc not lonely, although they measure for judging the outcomes of the vision of 'new Italian
lack animation; in these im.1ges the city is deserted like an colour photography' of the 1980s and 1990s: from Luigi Ghirri to
apartment that has not yet found new tenants. These are the works Giovanni Chiaramonte, from Guido Guidi to Gabriele Basilico,
in which the providential estrangement between the surrounding and to Olivo Barbieri. For all of these artists landscape is above all
world and man is prefigured ... '. Singularly enough, the journey an inventory and a catalogue of places: urban places, natural places,
into the 'new' of the contemporary landscape ends up coinciding historical places - places that take on the value of 'anthropological
with a journey 'against the grain', back to the very origins of the space', according to Merleau-Ponty's definition in the Phenomen-
invention of photography. This almost instinctive choice by the ology of Perception. Anthropological space, which is completely
young artists was the confirmation of the new horizon of the gaze different from geometric space, constitutes an existential space
in phenomenological and existential temts as initiated by Ugo because it is the place where the individual experiences relationship
Mulas and Luigi Ghirri. with the world. In this sense, we must understand photographic
From the 1970s, Mulas and Ghirri definitively freed Italian place as the space where we deploy a strategy of the gaze that
photography from the cultural impasse of the 'praxis and profession inscribes the external on the interior map of mental geography. But
of the eye', conferring on it a dignity and an artistic status that it is more than this. A condition inextricably linked to the gesture
inseparo~bly links reflection on the medium called photobrraphy to of taking photographs helps to determine the modalities of this
an ethical and cognitive instance of contemporary society. 'existential' space - that is, the experience of the journey. It is
Notwithstanding the generational difference, the author of Verifiche certainly no coincidence that these artists all cultivate the secret
and the author of Topogrtifia e Iconogrtifia find an intimate accord in myth of being 'on the road', like a secret adventure between dtem
the critical and analytical awareness they assume in relation to and the world. They travel on foot in the secret expectation that a
photographic writing. Taking its cue from the gesture of phenom- surprise awaits them at every turn, at every street comer, wherever
enological reduction, Verifohe sheds light on the limits of research they direct their erratic footsteps or gaze: in the landscape of the
dedicated to the acquisition of an existential dimension inspired by metropolis or in small historical cities, in the outer suburbs, or off
the journey. It is pervaded by a thrill of antazcment at the origins of the beaten track.
the invention. Mulas writes, 'For the photograph that I have The praxis of photography, as an experience that conflates the
entitled "Homage to Niepce" I have taken to re-reading the history journey and the existential relationship to places, cannot be
of photography, especially its origins. In these writings, what stands separated from that ecstatic response to spectacle that occurs in the
out is the wonder of having finally found the way of uncoupling coup d'oeil that precedes the shutter release and sets in action a
the hand of man from the creative process'. This rediscovery of the specific movement between external and internal. Like a sort of
sense of wonder connected to the moment of the invention of temporal short circuit, the gesture of 'posing' translates into the
photography constitutes a constant to which Luigi Ghirri also lays gesture of 'posing oneself, in a movement that conflates the
claim in his artistic research. The idea of the fantastic as the focal exterior view and the heightened view of one's own 'interiority'.
point of Ghirri's work is inseparo~ble from the recovery of that basic Jean Starobinsky's definition of modernity can be identified in this
vision that reconnects with the moment of the discovery of oscillation between external and internal: 'the loss of the subject of
photography. the spectacle of the world is at the same time the absolute power
According to Ghirri, his vision renews 'the dream of restoring claimed by the individual psyche'.
life through the life of the outside world. And through the strange Because of this 'individual conscience', relationship to the
muddle of reasons and mysteries of nature, chemical alchemies, world implies an experience of duality: of recognition or alienation,
laws of optics and physics, it reiterates the event that adds a further of belonging to places or exclusion; or ultimately of both if- as
gaze to our gaze on the world'. The choice of the magic toy called Starobinsky claims - modernity combines the existential place and
photography thus becomes the point of departure for reinventing a what it no longer is, relation to place and non-relation, belonging
perception of the world to counter the standardized and and exclusion. As a significant example of this coexistence,
stereotyped perception of the languages of mass communications. Starobinsky makes reference to the poetry that begins Baudelaire's
On this matter, Mulas reflects: Tableaux parisiens, where the spectacle of modernity unites and
brings together 'the workshop that sings and chatters' and 'the
The eyes, this magical meeting point between us and the chimneys and bell towers, masts of the city ship'. Beginning with
world, no longer come to terms with this world, with reality, Baudelaire, the ancient places function as background in the

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Ennery Taramelli

scenario of the modem. They are like indicators of Time that passes is the desire to avert the loss of a memory that has more to do with
but survives. Modernity preserves all the temporalities of places - the past than the present.
the past, the present -just as these fix themselves in the space of Alongside the places of an Italy found in the settings of small
the word or in the image. This reflection on modernity is critical cities or the anonymous suburbs, the eye of certain artists in fact
for understanding the gesture towards the past that in certain locates itself in the places of an urbanized landscape where industrial
respects distinguishes the work of a number of Italian authors. buildings, including old and new factories, arc raised up in the guise
Undoubtedly, the poetics of Luigi Ghirri and Giovanni of 'monuments' to industrial civilization. This is true of Gabriele
Chiaramonte fulfil the criterion of modernity in the terms in which Basilico, who for twenty years has focused on the old and new
Starobinsky traces its development from Baudelaire to Proust, up to industrial buildings that are scattered throughout the urban
Benjamin: the presence of the past in the present that supersedes periphery. Played out in strong chiaroscuro contrasts of black and
and revalidates it. Ghirri repeatedly compares his vision to Jorge white, his photographic vision favours those 'bodies' of factories
Luis Borges's story of a painter who had always painted landscapes, which in the photographic frame take on an almost anthropo-
things and places, only to discover, at the end of his life, that he had morphic appearance. They are bodies that live in the dimension of
always painted his own face. This situation is analogous to the suspended rime, inhabited by emptiness and silence and with the
vision of the Italian landscape presented by Ghirri. The face that his almost total exclusion of the human figure. Basilico writes:
images recompose is that of an ancient man whose acts, thoughts
There are buildings that reveal an anthropomorphic form,
and memories, as Starobinsky puts it, 'rest on the voice of a basso
thanks to the wisdom of those who planned them and to the
continuo that measures the rhythm of the hours of the earthly day
vision of those who photograph diem. Their architecture
and marks the place that was once occupied by ancient rituals'.
hides noses, ears, lips, faces that await the word, and the word
At the beginning of Paesaggio italiano, Ghirri writes: 'The
seems able to emerge only if they experience the revelatory
images of this Italian landscape might seem to be unmarked by the
event of light in the extreme conditions crc-dted by the
devastation of the contemporary world. The suspension of rime
absence of man. The presence of a man is sufficient to relegate
seems to cast them in the mould of the eighteenth-century
the architecture to the role of backdrop, to give the dramatic
journey'. But notwithstanding the exdusion of the human figure,
sense of absence to the emptiness. The absence of man, on the
man is a constant presence in this landscape that lives in 'suspended other hand, removes this dimension of anguish from
time'. The places and objects that inhabit these places speak to us of emptiness, and makes the emptiness what it truly is, because
humanity found in the setting of an Italian province; that is,
emptiness fills itself and become the subject itsel£ I do not
sketched out on the backdrop of a biographical memory where the
photograph emptiness in the sense of a lack of presence, but I
signs of the modem coexist with the still visible traces of ancient
photograph emptiness as its own protagonist, in all its lyricism
history, whether the light that outlines the form of places is still the
and all its force. Emptiness, in architecture, is an integral
natural light measured out from dawn to dusk, or the artificial light
structural part of its being.
of simple rows of streedights. Ghirri writes:
Developed as the existential condition of a world now dominated
In the various journeys that I have made throughout Italy as a
by the operational abstraction of industrial mechanization, this
photographer, I have always experienced a strange unease
poetics of emptiness increasingly tends to contlate the creation of a
when I encounter more or less illuminated monuments rows
desert out of the landscape of the existing and the illuminated
of neon lights, endless numbers of lamp posts that accentuate
horizon of the desert that inhabits the inner nature of humankind
dte loneliness and desolation of the urban outskirts. Perhaps I
in technocratic and post-Fordist 'civilization'.
still remember those rows of simple streedights, each with a
Guido Guidi is one artist who directs his footsteps and his gaze
flat shade, suspended on a wire that swayed with every tiny
towards iliese 'no-man's lands' that gradually extend beyond me
movement of the air, and that gave a disquieting and
suburban peripheries. The crux of his poetics is the urban 'inferno'
fascinating immobility to the shadows of every object and
to which ltalo Calvino gave voice in Invisible Cities: an urban sprawl
person.
that expands inexorably towards me countryside, but without any
This is the same journey of the gaze, once again with the quality of 'urban' identity; places of desolation and absence; an inextricable
an itinerary that looks back to the past, which unfolds in the pages confusion of signs that transform the landscape into a cemetery-like
of Peniso/4 delle figure, a book on Italian landscape by Giovanni desert. This theme of a periphery that expands out of control until
Chiaramonte. Dominating the setting of these images are in fact the it encompasses me entire planet is me distinguishing mark of the
traces of ancient memory - statues, columns - that stand out in vision of Olivo Barbieri: Carpi (near Modena) and Hong Kong are
the foreground, leaving in the background the chimneys of the interchangeable for this artist. Barbieri's photography is distin-
industrial landscape. guished by the very abstraction of speed through a sort of short
If it is true that photography, as a ti-dgmemary image, tends to circuit of rime and space that resembles intercontinental flight: this
obliterate a part of me world, Ghirri and Chiaramonte seem is a dimension that transforms geographical places on the periphery
deliberately to have chosen to remove themselves from the of an accelerated variability. Barbieri's places have neither identity,
deceptive settiJ1brs of modernity's vertigo of change and catastrophe. nor relationship, nor memory: they are not 'anthropological' in
What decides their choice of places to transfer into the space of Merleau-Ponty's terms. Artificially illuminated by neon lights that
'elsewhere' in the photographic &ante is the Utopian vision of make them blaze like film sets, Barbieri's urban settings recall the
constructing a world parallel to the real world but still human in its speed of transmission of electronically synthesized images. Against
dimensions. Ghirri comments: 'I have always looked at places with the light of the solar astral body as a source of iUumination, he
affection and love, in the attempt to capture a simple and wondrous contrasts the illumination of the astral motor: it is a genC'rator of
feeling of belonging, in the hope - perhaps ingenuous - of light as well as a temporal vector. He writes:
averting oilier disasters and other mortifications'.
For about ten years I have been photographing every source
It is not difficult to recognize in such a poetics of the gaze that
identifies choice of places with the quest for a feeling of belonging of light in Europe, China and Japan, by day and by night,
the resdcss longing for a different identity in contemporary society. and attempting to read landscape along classical, objective
A stranger to the inner self, post-urban man is in fact a figure of lines. Rejecting the point of departure, I have discovered the
unstable and transient identity. No longer the inhabitant of a world possibility of recounting a fantastic and delirious world,
and a culture, but an atopic figure, without fiXed abode and formally dose to the parallel reality of synthetic images,
without roots, post-urban man is a figure in whom ubiquity which today are best able to suggest me future scenarios of
(belonging everywhere) and absence converge. Linked to this our gaze.
difficult quest tor identity, the erratic nature of the gaze is inextric- Playing out as the hypothesis of a possible future, Barbieri's vision
ably tied to the theme of memory. The central point of this poetics takes the artifice called photography to the limit of its possibilities

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Visions of Italy

of reinventing the real. The logic that presides over the staging of Such allusions to metaphysical emptiness recur over and over
these 'scenarios of the future' is the logic of a world where distinc- again in this photographic vision, confirming that these visionaries
tions between true and f.Use, real and virtual no longer exist. A of 'elsewhere' tend towards a Utopian world, parallel to the real
sharp demarcation line separates the outcomes of the poetics of this one. Basilico writes: 'Beginning with Italian Metaphysical
artist with regard to his 'travelling companions'. For Ghirri, painting, many languages of vision have centred on this miracle of
Chiaramonte and Basilico, photography is the 'art of making': by vision: it is an empty and silent miracle because only in emptiness
transferring the exterior to the interior of a 'camera obscura', it and silence can one feel and see what which normally is not seen
renders visible the slow but intense activity of an 'affective' memory and not felt. It is a kind of reappropriation of nature and of the
that translates the view of the physical world into the illuminated city'. This reference to De Chirico is central to the photography
vision of one's own interior life. The artificial limb that is the of Barbieri, who reaffinns, with transgressive daring, that his
photographic 'eye' is a forum where ghosts, dreams, memories, and vision descends more from the f.ather of the Metaphysicals than
even obsessions swarm; they are staged and projected on photosen- from the photographic masters. In a recent interview he declared,
sitive photographic fJ.lm. Just as it was for Merleau-Ponty, the eye 'For me Giorgio De Chirico is more important than Walker
that sees is still the eye that imagines. Evans'. This is certainly no flippant comparison given that De
On the other hand, Barbieri's photography mimics the slow Chirico's 'mechanism of thought' has much in common with the
loss of authority of 'inner' images, which have been replaced by reflexive vision of the camera obscura. In the period in which he
the artifidally synthesized images that light up on the television or painted The Restless Muses at Ferrara, De Chirico wrote a note on
computer screen and that have no other origin than the electronic the analogy between his vision and the photographic vision: 'Nine
circuits that produce them. By conflating the product with its years have passed since that discovery illuminated the camera
projection on the screen, electronic images obliterate not only obscura of my conscience with a stormy nocturnal flash. I know
space and time, but also the sensation of a material fullness. It is no photographs more terrible than those taken inside a house at
no accident that the Pyramid photographed by Barbieri in a night with the flash of magnesium'. The ghostly dimension that
historic city such as Rome is like the simulacrum of a memory distinguishes the urban views of De Chirico in the 191 Os is the
slowly deprived of power by the slow but intense activity of long reference point for the night images of llarbieri, who conunents:
exposure times that discharge material reality to the point of 'I believe that the city is by definition ghostly and spectral. De
dematerializing the object. What remains is a phantasmagorical Chirico's atmospheres really do exist in urban landscape. I have
apparition, simultaneously magical and ghostly. Barbieri's vision done nothing except restore them through photography. For me
sets up an aesthetics of disappearance, to borrow a term from Paul it has been a fundamental affirmation to find a shared vision
Virilio, in opposition to the aesthetics of appearance theorized by which is strongly "Italian" and European at the same time.
Ghirri. Conflated with the mediated gaze of electronic vision, the Perhaps it had been rather lost sight of'. The metaphysical
photographic vision tends to affirm the emergence of the atmosphere in f.act appears in Baribieri's view of the Baptistery of
acorporeal. To photograph means to remove the body, to Florence. Dominated by the disquieting presence of a statue that
dematerialize it - in a word, to make the universe of appearances protrudes only partially, this image reveals a surprising analogy
disappear, by fixing appearances in a magnetic fluorescence which with a view of Turin by De Chirico, where the disquieting
is simultaneously ecstatic and anaesthetic. As occurs in science presence of an equestrian statue is half hidden by the arcade of
fiction films, the artificial visions of the European and Asian porticos. But it is also the multiplication of flights and perspective
metropolises staged by Barbieri provoke an instant immersion in planes in a single image that creates a precise match between
other worlds, in parallel universes where humanity's race to Barbieri's 'artificial' views and the metaphysical interiors.
disappearance has already occurred. What remains are automatons, It is not only the 'ghostly' magic of the Metaphysical vision
replicas -- virtual settings inhabited by the silence of a sidereal which demonstrates that the figurative art~ and photography
vacuum. share a way of seeing. A singular analogy in f.act links De
Despite the diversity of the poetics, the photographic vision of Chirico's 'rooms of memory' to Ghirri's 'places'. In a conunent
landscape in the 1980s and 1990s seems to find formal unity in the on the views of the Emilian landscape, Ghirri compares the
theme of emptiness, which might be considered an Italian menta/it£ places, which are portrayed more as a memory than as the
rather than a theme. From the cities of the Renaissance to the present, to a 'room': 'these places are also my place, my room:
metaphysical cities of De Chirico to the 'invisible' cities of figures on the walls: landscapes and portraits of ancestors impose
Michelangelo Antonioni, emptiness is the recurrent moti£ In on me a detachment that does not deny a subtle connection'. As
Ghirri's urban views, the emptiness of the Renaissance city appears well as alluding to the work of De Chirico, Ghirri's poetics of
to confirm the ideal principle of giving form to the world that finds the object claims a direct descent from the cinematic vision of
the intellectual criteria of order and symmetry in the frontal Federico Fellini and Michelanbrelo Antonioni. An essential
perspective point of view. The Utopia of the ideal city, staged in reference point of Ghirri's work derives from the phenomenolo-
the Renaissance in the imaginary space of the court theatres to gical approach to the world which constituted the cinematic gaze
exorcize the labyrinthine place of the real city, is realized again in of these two directors, who transformed the landscape of
the perspective vision of his photography. In his introduction to the anonymous and everyday objects into symbols which reveal
fiTSt work on the landscape of Emilia-Romagna, Ghirri cited a existential 'time'. Ghirri writes:
passage from LA ricerca del giardino by Hector Bianciotti. It leaves no
doubt about the ideal value that determines the choice of the I feel nostalgia for a certain period of Italian cinema, from
'prince's gaze': Nco-realism up to Fellini and Antonioni. It was a great era,
which allowed us 360-degree vision . . . . They too depicted
Unlike other illustrious cities where architectural volumes gasometers behind the Roman Forums, petrol stations and
compose a self-evident and inunutable order, the beauty of the electric wires along the country roads, and posters in the
grey city lies in it~ emptinesses, its spaces, the oblique suburbs. Through the continuities provided by such allusions,
geometry of avenues that correspond to the clear avenues of photography invites me to take up the challenge of contem-
the concept: the spirit of its inhabitants knows how to map poraneity and of the present - to construct an identity, inside
them like nobody else, reducing the complexity of the world and outside ourselves, in a singular synthesis of the outer and
to the point where it becomes comfortable. inner worlds.
It is a short step from the emptiness of the Renaissance cities to the Giovanni Chiaramonte frequently cites Blow-up as a revelatory
emptiness of De Chirico's Italian piv..7..as, where the perspective film:
order is broken by the ghostly apparition of simulacra of stone that
rise on the scene like relics of a dream world, ready to vanish for Antonioni's Blow-up affected me profoundly because I
ever. recalled that the fundamental human problem is always our

221
Ennery Taramelli

relationship with the world. This filin made me think that it Gardin, Fulvio Roiter, Mario Cresci, and Giovanni Bucci, who for
was possible to continue to make filins, despite believing that different reasons operated there between the late 1950s and the
lack of communication reigns among human beings and 1990s. Scanno was perceived to be a stronghold of ancient
knowing that for philosophers like Sartre 'man is a useless traditions, of honest rural people proud of their station in life and
passion'. Yet, as Antonioni himself says, Thomas, the not yet contaminated by the rush to modernization and industriali-
photographer in Blow-up, 'rejects commitment because he zation taking place elsewhere in Italy. That is how the Italians who
wants to make himself available for something that will be emigrated from Scanno to New York after the War rc;presented
and that is not yet'. their native village to Cartier-Bresson in the early 1950s. This led
Cartier-Bresson to visit Scanno and to spend approximately six
From autobiography to philosophical tales, from the quest for months there as part of a larger project taking him around Europe
identity to metalinguistic reflection on the enigma of vision, the in 1952 and 1953 in search of uncontaminated and rural
poetics of all these artists formed a unified strand of an experience environments. 9 One of his many distinctive characteristics in
that is profoundly linked to the destinies of vision in the Italian photography was his extraordinary abilitr, to merge with the
culture of images. This experience finds its unity in the perhaps environment which he was photographing. 0 In the preface to the
unconscious desire to avert the prophecy of Saul ofTarsus, which catalogue which accompanied the exhibition 'Scanno di Henri
seems increasingly relevant at the end of this millennium: 'this Cartier-Bresson', held in Scanno in 1982, Carlo Bertelli says: 'We
world, as we see it, is about to disappear'. (trans. Belinda McKay) imagine Henri Cartier-Bresson walking inconspicuously around the
streets of Scanno haphazardly mixing with the local people. In his
approach there is nothing which would have rendered as suspicious
or ruthless his job as a photojournalist'. 11 Of the body of work
Photographers of Scanno Cartier-Bresson produced in Scanno, three intages became almost
symbols of a Southern Italian village life which was still maintaining
Renzo Frontoni its ancient identity. None of these images was given a tide: a man
wearing dark glasses talking to a woman in a little alley; three
Scanno (1050 m above sea level) is situated in the Sagittario Valley elderly men attending midnight mass in a church; and two women
which is widely considered to be one of the most beautiful areas of carrying loaves of bread on their heads.
the Aquila province of the Abruzzi, a region in central southern Mario Giacomelli visited Scanno twice; in 1957 and in 1959.
Italy. The Abruzzi, and particularly Scanno, has attracted many But, in total, he spent just two days there. Younger than Cartier-
different visitors over the decades. The Italian writer Gabriele Bresson and not yet known as a photographer, for Giacomelli,
D'Annunzio in Trionfo della Morte (1894}, mentioned that the region
Scanno was a break from his previous work with landscape, and a
had drawn the attention of photographers in search of monuments,
continuation of his exploration of social issues, which had already
religious processions and images typical of the Grand Tour. 1 resulted in his series about an old people's home (1955-57). But
After the Second World War, the south ofltaly became one of
Scanno was more than a break; it came as a liberation for
the main topics of interest for the Italian intelligentsia because of Giacomelli. After three years spent in the old people's home (his
the grave social and political disparity with the northern part of the mother was a washer woman there), he was drained by the
Country. Carlo Levi's Christ stopped at Eboli, which describes the
experience. It was then that someone who knew his work suggested
day-to-day struggle of the Lucanian peasants after the war, 2 that he visit Scam10. He went there partly because out of curiosity
together with the reyublication in 1947 of Antonio Gramsci's LA and partly because of his desire to escape for a while from his native
Questione Meridionale, helped refuel the political debate on the need environment. On his first visit, he stayed overnight in the same
for cultural and political unification of the two halves of the country guest-house where Cartier-Bresson had found accommodation a
in postwar Italy. This debate, and others which followed, led social
few years before. The landlady told Giacomelli about Cartier-
photographers, such as Franco Pinna, Aldo Gilardi, Enzo Sellerio,
Bresson and showed him his signarure in her guest book. His
Ferdinando Scianna, and later in the 1970s Marialba Russo and
second visit came in the winter of 1959 when a friend drove him
Mimmo jodice, to look south in a series of explorations into folk there. He recalls: 'My friend R.enzo Tortelli and I drove an old Fiat
customs, religious ceremonies and the daily life of the pcople. 4 500 overnight in order to arrive in Scanno early in the morning. As
Scanno was part of these explorations but the photographers who soon as we arrived, I was so excited that I got out of the car while it
visited it from the 1950s found that it differed profoundly from the was still moving and I started to photograph'. 12 He was dazzled by
rest of southern Italy. In fact, the particular configuration of the the bright light he saw by contrast with the black ftgures of cows
village, with its houses built as if they were steps very close to each
and people. He continues: 'I was ovetwhelmed by joy in arriving
other, contributed to giving Scanno a distinctive quality. there because coming from the old people's home, a place of sadness
Contrasting theories about the origin of its population, costumes, and suffering, it was like being in a dream ... as if I was walking on
and traditions, which some historians and ethnologists argued to
air'. 13 Giacomelli's approach to Scanno was more emotional and
have come from Dalmatia and Greece at the tinte of the Greek personal than documentarist. In this regard, he states:
colonization of Italy,5 provided one clue as to why Scanno did not
conform to the stereotyped image of the poor South. Although one Cartier-Bresson went to Scanno as the detached witness of a
photographic critic of the time called Scanno the sanctuary of the strange and foreign culture. I went to Scanno as a participant.
southern rhetoric,6 this was not really the case. As the photographer My senses and my emotions were overwhelmed by what I felt
Paolo Monti, who visited the village at the beginning of the 1960s, to be its magical atmosphere. I didn't want to say anything
wrote in an article in 1981: about Scanno. At the same time, I said twice what I did not
intend to say. There was already a reality in front of me,
Scanno was an amazing place where time seemed to have which was the people of Scanno. I wanted to add to that my
stopped: medieval buildings, no cars, women dressed in black, own reality ftltcred through my childhood, my family, my
a distinct pe-.tsant culture, chickens and children on the streets, frustration, my previous work ... my whole world. 14
wonderful costumes. Despite what one might have thought, it
was not a poor village: it had decorum, and the mark of In Scanno, Giacomelli never entered into relationships with the
grandeur about its buildings. 7 people he photographed; he did not want their participation. The
use of a slow shurter-speed allowed him to let the photographs lose
Henri Cartier-Bresson and Mario Giacomelli's photographs of their documentary content by rendering people's faces unknowable
Scanno in the 1950s lent fame to the village as a place of as either blurred or out of focus:
photographic interest. Soon after, Scanno became a challenging
subject for some contemporary Italian photographers, such as I was honest towards the people I photographed in Scanno,
Giulio Panniani, Paolo Monti, Pepi Merisio, Gianni Berengo because it was not my intention to say anything about their

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