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In 1970 I began taking photographs the subject of which was photography itself, an attempt at an analysis of the photographic process in order to identify its underlying elements and their intrinsic value.
For instance, what is a sensitive surface? What does it mean to use a telephoto or a wide-angle lens? Why employ one format over another? Why enlarge an image? What ties a photograph to its caption? And so on. These are topics that you can find in any photography manual, but seen here from the opposite perspective, that is, from that of a professional with twenty years’ experience; whereas manuals are usually written for and read by complete beginners.
My digressions may spring from the need to clarify my own pursuit, perhaps rather commonplace a tendency among the self-taught. Having started out completely in the dark the intention is to shed light on everything, to continue to have immense respect for one’s craft that was learned by hard graft, one day at a time, marked also by a certain candour and a great deal of enthusiasm.
I called this series of photographs Verifiche (Verifications), because the goal was to help me to understand the meaning of the processes that for years I had repeated hundreds of times a day, without ever stopping to consider them as things in themselves, stripped of their practical function. I dedicated the first of these photos or verifications to Niépce. The only image of his that survives is a faded picture taken from the window of his home in Le Gras.
Some 150 years have passed since that day, but that moment, for a photographer, is the stuff of legend: this is a time when there was talk of pictures being made by the sun, of natural objects taking shape without the aid of an artist’s pencil; a time when a rather imaginative scientist lacking in faith in the skill of his own hand convinces himself that there has to be a more efficient means than his untrustworthy pencil to capture these fleeting images, and finds that means; while another scientist, presenting Daguerre’s invention, asserts that in the camera obscura the images create themselves.
It was a mythic era that soon burned itself out and with it the dream of having finally found a means of eliminating the inaccurate or unreliable hand from the creative process. Within a few years photography became big business: industries sprang up everywhere, applications for new patents were made almost daily. Nadar observed, with painful irony: “Photography is a marvellous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds – and one that can be practised by a complete idiot”. Long dreamed of by its inventors as the bearer of truth,
and therefore as a means of freeing the human being from the responsibility of representing that truth, photography was soon transformed into its opposite. Precisely owing to the blind trust that everyone is inclined to place in its objectivity, in its mechanical impartiality, photography lends itself to giving licence to the most ambiguous manipulations.
Photography did not give mankind the certainty of being able to represent itself and the world objectively, as Niépce and Fox Talbot perhaps dreamed it might. Rather, it ended up favouring an elite, that of the artists who offloaded onto photographers those humdrum tasks, virtually all of them, that until that point had remained one of the most unvarying, but frustrating aspects of their work. The worst among them improvised as photographers and often with great success, because the new medium was congenial to their interests and their natural gifts; others instead used photography as a model for their painting. Of such painting scarcely any may now remain – see Hill – but photographs have survived to give us an indication of their value.
Nowadays, photography and its by-products, television and cinema, are all around us wherever you look.
Our eyes, that magical meeting point between us and the world, no longer find themselves coming to terms with this world, with reality, with nature: increasingly we see the world through others’ eyes.
This may even be an advantage. Thousands of eyes instead of just two, but it’s not that simple. Of these thousands of eyes few, very few, follow an autonomous mental process, their own research, their own vision.
Even unwittingly, the thousands of eyes are connected to only a few brains, to specific interests, to a single power. Hence, unwittingly our eyes also, rather than conveying genuine information, poor and bare, but still authentic, furnish us with endless visual stimuli, which is doubly bewildering, because often their falsity is concealed behind a sort of radiance. We end up rejecting our own vision, which appears to us so drab compared with images elaborated by countless specialists in visual communication. And little by little the world is no longer sky, earth, fire, water: it is printed paper, ghosts evoked by machines that are increasingly perfect and persuasive. I am fully aware that reality is both more complex and more ambiguous. But this discussion has one purpose only: to reconstruct and understand what I was reflecting on a few years ago, when I began thinking about this photo and non-photo that is indeed the work dedicated to Niépce.
The need to clarify for myself certain assertions, and certain things I have rejected; for instance, one idea that I could not accept was rather widespread in the 1950s when I first began taking pictures – an idea that, as far as I can see, came into being based on a misinterpretation of particular statements or photos by Cartier-Bresson, and which was then exacerbated by a certain type of journalism – the proposition according to which a photo counts less for its truth than for its effect, for how it might strike the reader’s imagination.
Ever since, this idea has continued to degenerate, not only in photojournalism, but in every field where the photograph is commodified, in cinema, which each day becomes more vulgar, more aggressive if it is to satisfy the taste of the public which, like a drug addict, always craves another dose with every new day. Certain films that twenty years ago seemed dramatic to us, today at best make us smile. Photography is to a certain extent different insofar as, for better or worse, it deals with reality, just as Cartier-Bresson wrote when he presented Images à la sauvette in 1952. “A travers nos appareils, nous acceptons la vie dans toute sa réalité” (Through our cameras we accept life in its entirety), which is the gist of everything that may be said or written about photography. He is rather less clear when he writes that one must approach the subject as if stalking one’s prey, and that the photographer is always at the mercy of fleeting moments. Words which, if detached from their context and linked to certain extreme images taken by Cartier- Bresson himself, may have contributed to the widespread appeal of predatory photography, the hunt for the rarest and most unpredictable image; this would make the photographer a predator constantly waiting in ambush (at the time it was said – although I don’t know whether true or apocryphal – that Cartier- Bresson’s camera never left his side, not even when he sat down at the table to eat), ready to capture that fleeting instant, no matter what it was, as long as it was exceptional, possibly unique and unrepeatable.
Not that this theory may not have certain true and appealing aspects, but I struggled to accept the idea of an entire lifetime spent behind the camera waiting for that rare event, those few dozen or few hundred privileged moments that could then be collected in the form of an album or a book, the way a hunter decorates the walls of his home with his most important trophies.
I reject this idea or theory of the fleeting instant, because I believe that all instants are fleeting and in a certain sense one is as worthy as the next: perhaps the least significant one is actually the exceptional moment. In this regard I have never enjoyed taking pictures of exotic, far-flung places; I have never been to China, or India, or Japan, or South America, or Lapland, or Oceania, even though my work has often forced me to undertake long, extremely tedious trips. I can’t deny that trips can be useful, such as those taken for pleasure or for study purposes, as long as your eye is not always glued to the camera lens. Because I believe that a photographer can have adventures no less exciting and educational while wandering around on foot (in Milan) between Porta Romana and Porta Ticinese, or maybe exploring within his own mansion block the apartments of his neighbours, of whose names he remains ignorant. What is important is not so much the privileged moment as identifying one’s reality; after which, all moments are more or less equal.
Having circumscribed one’s territory, we can once again witness the miracle of the “images that create themselves,” because at that point the photographer must become an operator, that is, he must reduce his intervention to instrumental actions: the frame, the focus, the choice of the exposure time as it relates to the aperture, and, finally, the click of the shutter. Here, “thanks to the camera, we accept all its reality,” each of its “fleeting instants,” and we have arrived at that mythical time I mentioned at the start, where “the objects delineate themselves, without the help of the artist’s pencil.”
It is the photographer’s task to identify reality, and it is the machine’s task to record it in its totality. Two closely connected yet distinct actions, which, curiously, recall in a practical sense, processes honed by some artists in the 1920s: I am thinking of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, of some of Man Ray’s objects, where the artist’s intervention was totally irrelevant in terms of process, which consisted in the conceptual identification of a reality that was already materialised so that it was enough to indicate it for it to come to life in an ‘other’ dimension; so that the object, until that moment identical to a thousand others, began to find a place for itself in an ideal sphere forever detached
from the inert world of things. At this point I find it useful to reproduce some of the words in the text that Marcel Duchamp published in The Blind after the organisers of the first Salon des Indépendants in New York, in 1917, refused to exhibit Fountain, the famous urinal signed Richard Mutt (the name of a manufacturer of sanitary ware), but sent to the event by Duchamp: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”
And what is this object of mine dedicated to Niépce if not a readymade, albeit with variants? That is, “a banality,” as Marcel Jean writes in his book about Surrealism, “which is the starting point of a series of complex developments.”
The unused roll of film, one without exposures, but only developed, fixed, and proofed, loses its utilitarian meaning and makes way for a series of reactions that are consolidated in an almost automatic way in a series of pictures that I collected under the title of Verifiche (Verifications).
For instance, what is a sensitive surface? What does it mean to use a telephoto or a wide-angle lens? Why employ one format over another? Why enlarge an image? What ties a photograph to its caption? And so on. These are topics that you can find in any photography manual, but seen here from the opposite perspective, that is, from that of a professional with twenty years’ experience; whereas manuals are usually written for and read by complete beginners.
My digressions may spring from the need to clarify my own pursuit, perhaps rather commonplace a tendency among the self-taught. Having started out completely in the dark the intention is to shed light on everything, to continue to have immense respect for one’s craft that was learned by hard graft, one day at a time, marked also by a certain candour and a great deal of enthusiasm.
I called this series of photographs Verifiche (Verifications), because the goal was to help me to understand the meaning of the processes that for years I had repeated hundreds of times a day, without ever stopping to consider them as things in themselves, stripped of their practical function. I dedicated the first of these photos or verifications to Niépce. The only image of his that survives is a faded picture taken from the window of his home in Le Gras.
Some 150 years have passed since that day, but that moment, for a photographer, is the stuff of legend: this is a time when there was talk of pictures being made by the sun, of natural objects taking shape without the aid of an artist’s pencil; a time when a rather imaginative scientist lacking in faith in the skill of his own hand convinces himself that there has to be a more efficient means than his untrustworthy pencil to capture these fleeting images, and finds that means; while another scientist, presenting Daguerre’s invention, asserts that in the camera obscura the images create themselves.
It was a mythic era that soon burned itself out and with it the dream of having finally found a means of eliminating the inaccurate or unreliable hand from the creative process. Within a few years photography became big business: industries sprang up everywhere, applications for new patents were made almost daily. Nadar observed, with painful irony: “Photography is a marvellous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds – and one that can be practised by a complete idiot”. Long dreamed of by its inventors as the bearer of truth,
and therefore as a means of freeing the human being from the responsibility of representing that truth, photography was soon transformed into its opposite. Precisely owing to the blind trust that everyone is inclined to place in its objectivity, in its mechanical impartiality, photography lends itself to giving licence to the most ambiguous manipulations.
Photography did not give mankind the certainty of being able to represent itself and the world objectively, as Niépce and Fox Talbot perhaps dreamed it might. Rather, it ended up favouring an elite, that of the artists who offloaded onto photographers those humdrum tasks, virtually all of them, that until that point had remained one of the most unvarying, but frustrating aspects of their work. The worst among them improvised as photographers and often with great success, because the new medium was congenial to their interests and their natural gifts; others instead used photography as a model for their painting. Of such painting scarcely any may now remain – see Hill – but photographs have survived to give us an indication of their value.
Nowadays, photography and its by-products, television and cinema, are all around us wherever you look.
Our eyes, that magical meeting point between us and the world, no longer find themselves coming to terms with this world, with reality, with nature: increasingly we see the world through others’ eyes.
This may even be an advantage. Thousands of eyes instead of just two, but it’s not that simple. Of these thousands of eyes few, very few, follow an autonomous mental process, their own research, their own vision.
Even unwittingly, the thousands of eyes are connected to only a few brains, to specific interests, to a single power. Hence, unwittingly our eyes also, rather than conveying genuine information, poor and bare, but still authentic, furnish us with endless visual stimuli, which is doubly bewildering, because often their falsity is concealed behind a sort of radiance. We end up rejecting our own vision, which appears to us so drab compared with images elaborated by countless specialists in visual communication. And little by little the world is no longer sky, earth, fire, water: it is printed paper, ghosts evoked by machines that are increasingly perfect and persuasive. I am fully aware that reality is both more complex and more ambiguous. But this discussion has one purpose only: to reconstruct and understand what I was reflecting on a few years ago, when I began thinking about this photo and non-photo that is indeed the work dedicated to Niépce.
The need to clarify for myself certain assertions, and certain things I have rejected; for instance, one idea that I could not accept was rather widespread in the 1950s when I first began taking pictures – an idea that, as far as I can see, came into being based on a misinterpretation of particular statements or photos by Cartier-Bresson, and which was then exacerbated by a certain type of journalism – the proposition according to which a photo counts less for its truth than for its effect, for how it might strike the reader’s imagination.
Ever since, this idea has continued to degenerate, not only in photojournalism, but in every field where the photograph is commodified, in cinema, which each day becomes more vulgar, more aggressive if it is to satisfy the taste of the public which, like a drug addict, always craves another dose with every new day. Certain films that twenty years ago seemed dramatic to us, today at best make us smile. Photography is to a certain extent different insofar as, for better or worse, it deals with reality, just as Cartier-Bresson wrote when he presented Images à la sauvette in 1952. “A travers nos appareils, nous acceptons la vie dans toute sa réalité” (Through our cameras we accept life in its entirety), which is the gist of everything that may be said or written about photography. He is rather less clear when he writes that one must approach the subject as if stalking one’s prey, and that the photographer is always at the mercy of fleeting moments. Words which, if detached from their context and linked to certain extreme images taken by Cartier- Bresson himself, may have contributed to the widespread appeal of predatory photography, the hunt for the rarest and most unpredictable image; this would make the photographer a predator constantly waiting in ambush (at the time it was said – although I don’t know whether true or apocryphal – that Cartier- Bresson’s camera never left his side, not even when he sat down at the table to eat), ready to capture that fleeting instant, no matter what it was, as long as it was exceptional, possibly unique and unrepeatable.
Not that this theory may not have certain true and appealing aspects, but I struggled to accept the idea of an entire lifetime spent behind the camera waiting for that rare event, those few dozen or few hundred privileged moments that could then be collected in the form of an album or a book, the way a hunter decorates the walls of his home with his most important trophies.
I reject this idea or theory of the fleeting instant, because I believe that all instants are fleeting and in a certain sense one is as worthy as the next: perhaps the least significant one is actually the exceptional moment. In this regard I have never enjoyed taking pictures of exotic, far-flung places; I have never been to China, or India, or Japan, or South America, or Lapland, or Oceania, even though my work has often forced me to undertake long, extremely tedious trips. I can’t deny that trips can be useful, such as those taken for pleasure or for study purposes, as long as your eye is not always glued to the camera lens. Because I believe that a photographer can have adventures no less exciting and educational while wandering around on foot (in Milan) between Porta Romana and Porta Ticinese, or maybe exploring within his own mansion block the apartments of his neighbours, of whose names he remains ignorant. What is important is not so much the privileged moment as identifying one’s reality; after which, all moments are more or less equal.
Having circumscribed one’s territory, we can once again witness the miracle of the “images that create themselves,” because at that point the photographer must become an operator, that is, he must reduce his intervention to instrumental actions: the frame, the focus, the choice of the exposure time as it relates to the aperture, and, finally, the click of the shutter. Here, “thanks to the camera, we accept all its reality,” each of its “fleeting instants,” and we have arrived at that mythical time I mentioned at the start, where “the objects delineate themselves, without the help of the artist’s pencil.”
It is the photographer’s task to identify reality, and it is the machine’s task to record it in its totality. Two closely connected yet distinct actions, which, curiously, recall in a practical sense, processes honed by some artists in the 1920s: I am thinking of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, of some of Man Ray’s objects, where the artist’s intervention was totally irrelevant in terms of process, which consisted in the conceptual identification of a reality that was already materialised so that it was enough to indicate it for it to come to life in an ‘other’ dimension; so that the object, until that moment identical to a thousand others, began to find a place for itself in an ideal sphere forever detached
from the inert world of things. At this point I find it useful to reproduce some of the words in the text that Marcel Duchamp published in The Blind after the organisers of the first Salon des Indépendants in New York, in 1917, refused to exhibit Fountain, the famous urinal signed Richard Mutt (the name of a manufacturer of sanitary ware), but sent to the event by Duchamp: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”
And what is this object of mine dedicated to Niépce if not a readymade, albeit with variants? That is, “a banality,” as Marcel Jean writes in his book about Surrealism, “which is the starting point of a series of complex developments.”
The unused roll of film, one without exposures, but only developed, fixed, and proofed, loses its utilitarian meaning and makes way for a series of reactions that are consolidated in an almost automatic way in a series of pictures that I collected under the title of Verifiche (Verifications).
The photograph I called Homage to Niépce is the result of a re-examination of my work as a photographer that I carried out a few years ago. I had begun to read books on the history
of photography, especially about its origins, certain reflections, certain writings by Niépce, Fox Talbot, Daguerre, and others. In these writings what stood out the most was the amazement at having at last found a way of separating the human hand from the creative process. It is a utopia; but the opposite is true as well, that is, it is also true that there is a power on the sensitive surface that goes beyond the human hand. From this point of view, you find yourself coming to terms not only with the objective reality, with the world, but also with the surface that is so significant that it takes you where, at times, you would rather not go. In other words, you are forced to accept the reality. Walter Benjamin, in comparing the photograph to portrait panting, wrote: “With photography, however, we encounter something new and strange; in Hill’s Newhaven fishwife, her eyes cast down in such indolent, seductive modesty, there remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art, something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in art.”
As I thought about all this, I found myself coming to terms with my own work as well, a type of work that I began by chance. I was never even an amateur photographer: the first photo I took I sold right away. I was a student, hanging around almost always in that sort of café that was the Jamaica at the time, a latteria, or dairy store) where painters gathered. Someone lent me an old camera and said: “One one hundredth and eleven in the sun, one twenty-fifth five six in the shade.” And I, with great diffidence, took that camera in my hands. At first, the most exciting thing was the lab; I glimpsed the possibility of saving a photograph that had been poorly taken thanks to some process conducted in the darkroom, that is, using a particular type of paper, a certain cut. Then I realized just how important the lab is, because the image you create with your camera is not complete if it isn’t printed by you, or based on very precise indications that you have provided; but the lab could not be a panacea for all the problems with the shot, that its purpose was not to rescue negatives that came out wrong, but only to bestow on a good negative all of its value. Instead, the lab is important if we use it for what it is in itself, that is, if we eliminate the lens, and work directly on the surfaces, whether paper or film, the way Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy did, along with many others, with the precise intent of using what takes place in the lab as an independent fact, as a means to achieving an image that is purer and as direct as possible.
I remember how happy it made me to see my first successful photographs: I discovered in those images things I had not predicted, and that came into being precisely by virtue of the mechanism, the camera, the lens, the chemistry. And this empowered me. After a while you can forget how much you owe the camera; you feel as though you’re the one responsible for everything that happens, and you end up asking the camera to convey to you all of its power without worrying about the purpose, as long as it guarantees your success. You thus end up attributing to yourself a power that is nothing other than an extra force, one that you just happened to find yourself holding in your hands.
Around 1958 one book meant a lot to me: The Americans by Robert Frank. In those years I was interested in another type of photographic literature: the great photographers seemed to me to be the ones closest to the dangerous game of power I mentioned before. Instead in Frank’s book I could see for the first time a photographer who didn’t use any tricks, who took pictures that resembled those of an amateur, that is how technically simple they were. It took me a few years to understand this, because in the meantime I was distracted by my professional work, by my needs, by lots of things. Until I finally understood the meaning of Frank’s work: his not taking advantage, for the purpose of confusing this game of reality, of things, of life. The fact that the camera works on life directly, using people’s skin. Frank’s technical photographic discourse is the simplest of all: he uses a small camera, and an angular field wide enough not to emphasise the detail.
Many times I looked at Klein’s book about New York as an opposite solution. There you can sense that the photographer would have liked to go everywhere, to be more inside things with his hands,
his ideology, that reality as it was was not enough, and so he cut, enlarged, burned, intervened as much as he could on the negative. I ask myself why, if a thing is already in itself shouted out, why would you need to add another shout; if a thing is already photographic, why you need to add another photographic element?
Then, in 1964, I went to America for a few months. It was something I personally felt the need to do, because no one had sent me there. I felt the need to go there after visiting the Venice Biennale: Johns, Dine, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Stella, Chamberlain were all there. At first, in the United States I was more dazed than convinced. Then I became enthusiastic, because it was not so much a question of coming into contact with a certain type of painting, as one of entering the world of the painters, and at the same time sharing an extraordinary moment, being witness to something that was truly important just as it was unfolding and being affirmed. I had already photographed the artists, for instance Severini, Carrà likewise, but I had the feeling I was photographing survivors. I would have liked to photograph them in 1910, in 1912: it would have made sense then, while now all I was doing was recording their physical survival as major figures.
From my American experience a book was born, and if the photographs in that book mean anything, it was precisely in the fact of my taking part which I feared at the time, because I was conscious of a risk, because I knew of the allure of the people I was meeting, and that what was happening might betray me. For this reason, to escape this danger in part, I almost always used the same lens; not to distort face or objects as was the fashion in those years, but to remain as much as possible on the outside, distant, detached from what was happening, and also involve as many things as possible, as much space as possible, not isolating the protagonists but totally immersing them in their element. As I was taking pictures in New York and looking around, in Jim Dine’s house I was surprised to find a small framed photograph where you could see the interior of a room, probably in a hotel, with a TV on and the smiling face of a woman presenting some show. The room is empty, there is no presence other than the one mediated by the television. I continued with my work, but every now and again my mind wandered back to that photograph; I thought about the meaning of what I was doing, about whether that photograph actually made any sense. It was a photo by Friedlander, who was a complete unknown at the time – at least in Europe, where he continues to be unknown – because he was a photographer who rejected the mainstream channels of mass consumption, or perhaps those channels rejected him. Later, around 1968, I happened to come across some of Jim Dine’s print portfolios containing pictures taken by Friedlander, with a selection of about a dozen very specific photos, which open up new discussions. I believe there has never been a photographer as aware of what the photographic process involves, of how the photographer is him- or herself inside that process, in the camera or in the process, even physically so, and how this endows the photograph with all the ambiguities that accompany the first-person considerations. Between the photographer and the object the camera comes to life, it is a bulwark, but it is no longer the convenient bulwark against the neutrality of the photographer, nor is it an obstacle to his desire to intervene. What astonished me at the time was realising how the photographer lets himself be led by the camera, and vice versa, how the camera carries the photographer with truly unusual ease.
During my stay in America I had a chance to meet Robert Frank and we discussed all this. I explained to him that in my case I wanted to be impersonal, that I wanted to be someone who arrived on the scene and let the camera do the recording. Frank didn’t agree, he said you had to participate, be responsible, run the risk not only of making a mistake, but also of intervening and judging. I wanted to be a witness, I wanted to accept as many things as possible, but I couldn’t explain it. Clearly inside me there was either preparation or a lack of the same, there was a story, by which I mean that in the end, whether I intended to make it so or otherwise, my point of view came out in the photograph. But I didn’t know that being aware of this fact also meant having a different attitude at the time the picture was being taken, at the time the decision was made to photograph something and how it should be done. Today I recognise that the pictures I took in America are a real awareness and not a recording, the same awareness that you can find in any authentic cognitive action.
So, at a certain point, I began to use processes that were separate from those of others, separate from my desire to be a witness and to gather other people’s experiences, to see what this feeling of being alone vis-à-vis making something is, what it means no longer to seek props, no longer to seek truth in others, but instead to find it in ourselves, and to understand what the nature of this work is, to analyse each of its operations, to dismantle it as you might a camera, to become acquainted with it. Hence, this photograph, this object was born, the first in a series of verifications, after much hesitation, because I feared that the operation was too cerebral. I dedicated this first work to Niépce, because the first thing I found myself coming to terms with was the film roll, the sensitive surface, the key element of my entire trade, which is also the nucleus around which Niépce’s invention took shape. It is a verification, that is first of all a homage, a gesture of gratitude, a rendering unto Niépce what belongs to Niépce. For once the means, the sensitive surface, is the protagonist; it represents nothing other than itself.
We find ourselves before an unexposed roll of film that has been developed; the small piece that remained outside the cartridge was exposed to the light independently of my will, because it is the small piece that is always exposed to the light when you have to load the film into the camera: it is a pure photographic fact.
Even before the photographer begins any part of the process, something has already happened. Besides this small piece that is exposed to the light at the beginning, I also wanted to save the final part, the one that fastens the film to the spool. It is a small piece that you never use, that is never exposed, that you throw out, but that is still of fundamental importance. It is the point where a photographic sequence ends. Emphasising this piece means once again emphasising the moment when you take the film roll out of the camera to take it to the lab. It means finishing the work. This, too, is a photographic presence because, since there is still some glue stuck there, the light can’t pass through it. The film is printed in contact: the sheet of sensitive paper is placed underneath the enlarger, the negative cut into strips is arranged on the sheet, and placed on top of that is a rather heavy sheet of glass that keeps the strips pressed down, as flat as possible, so that the individual photograms appear neat, well-defined. Usually, a very small sheet is used, but I wanted to accentuate the glass, too. The glass frames the image, and it cannot be exchanged for a graphic element added to frame the photograph: without the glass there would not be that specific image, and what I like to consider is how, depending on the way the glass was cut, the outline surrounding the image thins accordingly. You can see that it wasn’t made by hand to produce a frame; it, too, is an element of the photograph.
I might add that this homage to Niépce represents thirty-six lost opportunities, thirty-six rejected opportunities, at a time when, as Robert Frank remarked in a comment about photojournalism, the air had become infected by the stench of photography.
of photography, especially about its origins, certain reflections, certain writings by Niépce, Fox Talbot, Daguerre, and others. In these writings what stood out the most was the amazement at having at last found a way of separating the human hand from the creative process. It is a utopia; but the opposite is true as well, that is, it is also true that there is a power on the sensitive surface that goes beyond the human hand. From this point of view, you find yourself coming to terms not only with the objective reality, with the world, but also with the surface that is so significant that it takes you where, at times, you would rather not go. In other words, you are forced to accept the reality. Walter Benjamin, in comparing the photograph to portrait panting, wrote: “With photography, however, we encounter something new and strange; in Hill’s Newhaven fishwife, her eyes cast down in such indolent, seductive modesty, there remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art, something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in art.”
As I thought about all this, I found myself coming to terms with my own work as well, a type of work that I began by chance. I was never even an amateur photographer: the first photo I took I sold right away. I was a student, hanging around almost always in that sort of café that was the Jamaica at the time, a latteria, or dairy store) where painters gathered. Someone lent me an old camera and said: “One one hundredth and eleven in the sun, one twenty-fifth five six in the shade.” And I, with great diffidence, took that camera in my hands. At first, the most exciting thing was the lab; I glimpsed the possibility of saving a photograph that had been poorly taken thanks to some process conducted in the darkroom, that is, using a particular type of paper, a certain cut. Then I realized just how important the lab is, because the image you create with your camera is not complete if it isn’t printed by you, or based on very precise indications that you have provided; but the lab could not be a panacea for all the problems with the shot, that its purpose was not to rescue negatives that came out wrong, but only to bestow on a good negative all of its value. Instead, the lab is important if we use it for what it is in itself, that is, if we eliminate the lens, and work directly on the surfaces, whether paper or film, the way Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy did, along with many others, with the precise intent of using what takes place in the lab as an independent fact, as a means to achieving an image that is purer and as direct as possible.
I remember how happy it made me to see my first successful photographs: I discovered in those images things I had not predicted, and that came into being precisely by virtue of the mechanism, the camera, the lens, the chemistry. And this empowered me. After a while you can forget how much you owe the camera; you feel as though you’re the one responsible for everything that happens, and you end up asking the camera to convey to you all of its power without worrying about the purpose, as long as it guarantees your success. You thus end up attributing to yourself a power that is nothing other than an extra force, one that you just happened to find yourself holding in your hands.
Around 1958 one book meant a lot to me: The Americans by Robert Frank. In those years I was interested in another type of photographic literature: the great photographers seemed to me to be the ones closest to the dangerous game of power I mentioned before. Instead in Frank’s book I could see for the first time a photographer who didn’t use any tricks, who took pictures that resembled those of an amateur, that is how technically simple they were. It took me a few years to understand this, because in the meantime I was distracted by my professional work, by my needs, by lots of things. Until I finally understood the meaning of Frank’s work: his not taking advantage, for the purpose of confusing this game of reality, of things, of life. The fact that the camera works on life directly, using people’s skin. Frank’s technical photographic discourse is the simplest of all: he uses a small camera, and an angular field wide enough not to emphasise the detail.
Many times I looked at Klein’s book about New York as an opposite solution. There you can sense that the photographer would have liked to go everywhere, to be more inside things with his hands,
his ideology, that reality as it was was not enough, and so he cut, enlarged, burned, intervened as much as he could on the negative. I ask myself why, if a thing is already in itself shouted out, why would you need to add another shout; if a thing is already photographic, why you need to add another photographic element?
Then, in 1964, I went to America for a few months. It was something I personally felt the need to do, because no one had sent me there. I felt the need to go there after visiting the Venice Biennale: Johns, Dine, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Stella, Chamberlain were all there. At first, in the United States I was more dazed than convinced. Then I became enthusiastic, because it was not so much a question of coming into contact with a certain type of painting, as one of entering the world of the painters, and at the same time sharing an extraordinary moment, being witness to something that was truly important just as it was unfolding and being affirmed. I had already photographed the artists, for instance Severini, Carrà likewise, but I had the feeling I was photographing survivors. I would have liked to photograph them in 1910, in 1912: it would have made sense then, while now all I was doing was recording their physical survival as major figures.
From my American experience a book was born, and if the photographs in that book mean anything, it was precisely in the fact of my taking part which I feared at the time, because I was conscious of a risk, because I knew of the allure of the people I was meeting, and that what was happening might betray me. For this reason, to escape this danger in part, I almost always used the same lens; not to distort face or objects as was the fashion in those years, but to remain as much as possible on the outside, distant, detached from what was happening, and also involve as many things as possible, as much space as possible, not isolating the protagonists but totally immersing them in their element. As I was taking pictures in New York and looking around, in Jim Dine’s house I was surprised to find a small framed photograph where you could see the interior of a room, probably in a hotel, with a TV on and the smiling face of a woman presenting some show. The room is empty, there is no presence other than the one mediated by the television. I continued with my work, but every now and again my mind wandered back to that photograph; I thought about the meaning of what I was doing, about whether that photograph actually made any sense. It was a photo by Friedlander, who was a complete unknown at the time – at least in Europe, where he continues to be unknown – because he was a photographer who rejected the mainstream channels of mass consumption, or perhaps those channels rejected him. Later, around 1968, I happened to come across some of Jim Dine’s print portfolios containing pictures taken by Friedlander, with a selection of about a dozen very specific photos, which open up new discussions. I believe there has never been a photographer as aware of what the photographic process involves, of how the photographer is him- or herself inside that process, in the camera or in the process, even physically so, and how this endows the photograph with all the ambiguities that accompany the first-person considerations. Between the photographer and the object the camera comes to life, it is a bulwark, but it is no longer the convenient bulwark against the neutrality of the photographer, nor is it an obstacle to his desire to intervene. What astonished me at the time was realising how the photographer lets himself be led by the camera, and vice versa, how the camera carries the photographer with truly unusual ease.
During my stay in America I had a chance to meet Robert Frank and we discussed all this. I explained to him that in my case I wanted to be impersonal, that I wanted to be someone who arrived on the scene and let the camera do the recording. Frank didn’t agree, he said you had to participate, be responsible, run the risk not only of making a mistake, but also of intervening and judging. I wanted to be a witness, I wanted to accept as many things as possible, but I couldn’t explain it. Clearly inside me there was either preparation or a lack of the same, there was a story, by which I mean that in the end, whether I intended to make it so or otherwise, my point of view came out in the photograph. But I didn’t know that being aware of this fact also meant having a different attitude at the time the picture was being taken, at the time the decision was made to photograph something and how it should be done. Today I recognise that the pictures I took in America are a real awareness and not a recording, the same awareness that you can find in any authentic cognitive action.
So, at a certain point, I began to use processes that were separate from those of others, separate from my desire to be a witness and to gather other people’s experiences, to see what this feeling of being alone vis-à-vis making something is, what it means no longer to seek props, no longer to seek truth in others, but instead to find it in ourselves, and to understand what the nature of this work is, to analyse each of its operations, to dismantle it as you might a camera, to become acquainted with it. Hence, this photograph, this object was born, the first in a series of verifications, after much hesitation, because I feared that the operation was too cerebral. I dedicated this first work to Niépce, because the first thing I found myself coming to terms with was the film roll, the sensitive surface, the key element of my entire trade, which is also the nucleus around which Niépce’s invention took shape. It is a verification, that is first of all a homage, a gesture of gratitude, a rendering unto Niépce what belongs to Niépce. For once the means, the sensitive surface, is the protagonist; it represents nothing other than itself.
We find ourselves before an unexposed roll of film that has been developed; the small piece that remained outside the cartridge was exposed to the light independently of my will, because it is the small piece that is always exposed to the light when you have to load the film into the camera: it is a pure photographic fact.
Even before the photographer begins any part of the process, something has already happened. Besides this small piece that is exposed to the light at the beginning, I also wanted to save the final part, the one that fastens the film to the spool. It is a small piece that you never use, that is never exposed, that you throw out, but that is still of fundamental importance. It is the point where a photographic sequence ends. Emphasising this piece means once again emphasising the moment when you take the film roll out of the camera to take it to the lab. It means finishing the work. This, too, is a photographic presence because, since there is still some glue stuck there, the light can’t pass through it. The film is printed in contact: the sheet of sensitive paper is placed underneath the enlarger, the negative cut into strips is arranged on the sheet, and placed on top of that is a rather heavy sheet of glass that keeps the strips pressed down, as flat as possible, so that the individual photograms appear neat, well-defined. Usually, a very small sheet is used, but I wanted to accentuate the glass, too. The glass frames the image, and it cannot be exchanged for a graphic element added to frame the photograph: without the glass there would not be that specific image, and what I like to consider is how, depending on the way the glass was cut, the outline surrounding the image thins accordingly. You can see that it wasn’t made by hand to produce a frame; it, too, is an element of the photograph.
I might add that this homage to Niépce represents thirty-six lost opportunities, thirty-six rejected opportunities, at a time when, as Robert Frank remarked in a comment about photojournalism, the air had become infected by the stench of photography.
Sometime after completing Homage to Niépce I wanted to verify another aspect of the reality of photography: the camera. There is a mirror up against the window, the sun shines on the window, it projects the shadow of an upright against the wall and at the same time my shadow. This shadow shows that I am taking a picture, and my action is also visible in the mirror. Both cases have one element in common: the camera eliminates the photographer’s face because it (the camera) is at eye level, and it conceals the facial features. This verification is dedicated to the photographer who, I believe, was most keenly aware of this problem, and who tried to overcome the barrier that is the camera, that is, the very medium he used for his work and of his way of knowing and creating.
Perhaps, here as in the following self-portrait with Nini, there is the obsession of being present, of seeing myself as I see, of participating, of involving myself. Or rather, there is an awareness that the camera does not belong to me, it is an additional medium the importance of which we can neither exaggerate nor underestimate, but precisely for this reason it is a medium where the more I am present the more it excludes me.
Perhaps, here as in the following self-portrait with Nini, there is the obsession of being present, of seeing myself as I see, of participating, of involving myself. Or rather, there is an awareness that the camera does not belong to me, it is an additional medium the importance of which we can neither exaggerate nor underestimate, but precisely for this reason it is a medium where the more I am present the more it excludes me.
Between the end of 1969 and the beginning of 1970, Kounellis took part in the exhibition Vitalità del negativo in Rome. A piano was placed in a wide neutral space and, twice a day, a pianist played a partly modified piece from Verdi’s Nabucco for several hours, the music thus becoming an obsessive motif. To take a picture of the pianist while he was playing seemed unimportant, at most it was just a mere documentation for Kounellis. So I placed myself on the side opposite the musician and, from that fixed position, I tried to photograph the hall. My intention was to convey the feeling of obsession produced by the recurrence of the music as well as the sense of the musical time which is antithetical to the photographic time. Photo after photo, while the image remained motionless, because I remained in the same place, and the pianist’s movements were so small in such a large space they were hardly perceptible; the music kept coming and going, closing me within a kind of circle. The result was an entire roll of thirty-six almost identical photograms. There are thirty-six of them not owing to my choosing, but because a full roll is made up of thirty-six shots. In the contact print the numbers on the edge of the film follow one another along the still image: if not for their presence, you might think these were thirty-six repeated photos.
The only thing that changes are the numbers: not a convenient sequence but a linguistic reality. Time, that is, acquires an abstract dimension. In photography it does not run naturally, as it does in cinema and literature: different times are simultaneously present on the same sheet, in the same moment, apart from any concrete observation. This stillness is more effective than any actual movement, it is the obsession of the repeated image that makes the dimension of photographic time come out.
The only thing that changes are the numbers: not a convenient sequence but a linguistic reality. Time, that is, acquires an abstract dimension. In photography it does not run naturally, as it does in cinema and literature: different times are simultaneously present on the same sheet, in the same moment, apart from any concrete observation. This stillness is more effective than any actual movement, it is the obsession of the repeated image that makes the dimension of photographic time come out.
Lamberto Vitali had shown me some photographs by the Fratelli Alinari, portraying King Vittorio Emanuele II. I was struck by one in particular: on the same plate there were two images of the king. They were practically identical except that one of them showed the king more in profile than the other. The truth of the matter is that one of the photos had been touched up. The photographer had used a large-format plate for very small photographs, similar to calling cards of just a few inches in size, for the sake of convenience, in different poses. Using a chassis with two small openings he made two emulsions. The result of his work is this double photo: in one the king has a proud, somewhat heroic look; in the other, which hasn’t been touched up, the king looks old, with dark circles under his eyes, as if he were mummified by age. The presence at the same time not so much of two photos as of two realities on one sheet is surprising, also owing to the figure portrayed, being a king, the very image of power. On the same imprint two apparently identical images, but they are actually opposites, as if one were true and the other false, the indications of an approach that is, in fact, the use of photography: the true story that remains in the archives, and the embellished, more palatable one that is disseminated.
If there is any one thing that absolutely cannot be enlarged it is the sky. A photograph of a clear, cloudless day with no terrestrial references is either absurd or a paradox. So from the balcony of my home, toward sunset, I used a whole roll of film with
various images of the sky, holding my camera both vertically and horizontally. The resulting sequence is rich in gradations from one photogram to another, in terms of depth, intensity. Then I chose one photogram and enlarged it as much as I could, so that you could see the grain. The third process was enlarging a tiny detail of the previous photogram as much as my studio allowed me to: from a detail measuring slightly more than three centimetres to almost three-and-a-half metres. At that point the sky disappeared and all that was left was a grainy surface. The dominant element was the clumps of silver salts, the graininess. You realise you could get the same image by photographing a wall, in other words, the image is reversible, interchangeable.
various images of the sky, holding my camera both vertically and horizontally. The resulting sequence is rich in gradations from one photogram to another, in terms of depth, intensity. Then I chose one photogram and enlarged it as much as I could, so that you could see the grain. The third process was enlarging a tiny detail of the previous photogram as much as my studio allowed me to: from a detail measuring slightly more than three centimetres to almost three-and-a-half metres. At that point the sky disappeared and all that was left was a grainy surface. The dominant element was the clumps of silver salts, the graininess. You realise you could get the same image by photographing a wall, in other words, the image is reversible, interchangeable.
September 16. 1824, Joseps Nicéphore Niépce writes to his brother Claude: “I am happy to be able to finally tell you that… I succeeded in taking a photograph of nature that is so good I couldn’t ask for more… I took the picture from your room on the side looking out onto Le Gras.”
Every now and again I go to the window and look down at the courtyard. I knew there was a photography supplies store there and I was well aware of the sign: “Agfa forniture generali per la fotografia” (Agfa General Suppliers for Photography), but I had never related all this to the only surviving photograph by Niépce. I used Agfa film to photograph the courtyard, and I printed the photogram so that you could read the sign Agfa running along the edge of the film on the contact sheet. Then I enlarged it until you could just glimpse, small in size and at the bottom, the business sign. Lastly, I chose that detail, the sign, to emerge as the only element of the photo. In this case the medium, the film, the object and the name, become the subject. In the photogram you can see the courtyard but not the sign, and the name Agfa is not on the image but on the film: the advertising sign, in the second half of this sequence, begins to emerge. Lastly, in the third image the sign has been enlarged as much as possible and it is
practically made up of clumps of silver salts. In other words, the light-sensitive surface is made visible in its structure: the silver salts are what compose the name Agfa that tells us what the photo has become, commercially: a means of prevarication, of pseudo-information, in any case exactly the opposite of what Niépce, in honing the sensitive surface, intended to do.
Every now and again I go to the window and look down at the courtyard. I knew there was a photography supplies store there and I was well aware of the sign: “Agfa forniture generali per la fotografia” (Agfa General Suppliers for Photography), but I had never related all this to the only surviving photograph by Niépce. I used Agfa film to photograph the courtyard, and I printed the photogram so that you could read the sign Agfa running along the edge of the film on the contact sheet. Then I enlarged it until you could just glimpse, small in size and at the bottom, the business sign. Lastly, I chose that detail, the sign, to emerge as the only element of the photo. In this case the medium, the film, the object and the name, become the subject. In the photogram you can see the courtyard but not the sign, and the name Agfa is not on the image but on the film: the advertising sign, in the second half of this sequence, begins to emerge. Lastly, in the third image the sign has been enlarged as much as possible and it is
practically made up of clumps of silver salts. In other words, the light-sensitive surface is made visible in its structure: the silver salts are what compose the name Agfa that tells us what the photo has become, commercially: a means of prevarication, of pseudo-information, in any case exactly the opposite of what Niépce, in honing the sensitive surface, intended to do.
“Experiment 1013. January 29, 1939. Found the sodium thiosulfate needed to arrest the action of the light thus eliminating by washing all the silver chloride. Perfect results. Paper half-exposed, and half-protected from the light thanks to a cardboard cover.
Then taken out of the light and sprayed with sodium thiosulfate, followed by a thorough cleansing with pure water. Dried, then exposed again, the dark half remains dark, the white half remains white whatever the exposure time.”
This is my lab verification, that is, a process in which the camera is excluded and the development and fixing are highlighted: a process that I wanted to be devoid of emotion and extremely dry and clear, the same as that described in the scientific annotation left to us by Herschel.
In the lab everything is done with one’s hands: taking the sheets, placing them under the enlarger, adjusting the focus, lifting the enlarger, lowering it, taking the sheet, immersing it in the fixer. The hands play the main role, and they are also the subject of this pair of photographs: I immersed one in the developer, the other in the fixer. After allowing the sheet to be exposed to the light, under the enlarger, I placed them and flattened them on the sheet itself so as to divide it in two. The hand immersed in the developer appeared instantly, the other hand only appeared when half of the sheet had been developed.
Then taken out of the light and sprayed with sodium thiosulfate, followed by a thorough cleansing with pure water. Dried, then exposed again, the dark half remains dark, the white half remains white whatever the exposure time.”
This is my lab verification, that is, a process in which the camera is excluded and the development and fixing are highlighted: a process that I wanted to be devoid of emotion and extremely dry and clear, the same as that described in the scientific annotation left to us by Herschel.
In the lab everything is done with one’s hands: taking the sheets, placing them under the enlarger, adjusting the focus, lifting the enlarger, lowering it, taking the sheet, immersing it in the fixer. The hands play the main role, and they are also the subject of this pair of photographs: I immersed one in the developer, the other in the fixer. After allowing the sheet to be exposed to the light, under the enlarger, I placed them and flattened them on the sheet itself so as to divide it in two. The hand immersed in the developer appeared instantly, the other hand only appeared when half of the sheet had been developed.
Generally speaking, in textbooks written for a popular readership there is a sequence of pictures of the same landscape taken using different lenses: from the totality of the landscape by successive phases down to its smallest detail.
A mechanical explanation is offered, concerning, that is, the ability of lenses to bring the viewer up close to something or farther away from it, to reduce or to enlarge the field. Instead, the explanation should be understood in a linguistic sense: using a wide-angle or a telephoto lens to reproduce the same image means already offering two different interpretations. In the former, the face will be distorted in the manner of a caricature, because the parts in the foreground will appear to be larger than would be the case were a normal lens to be used, while the more distant parts will be fleeting or even eliminated. In the latter image all the elements are brought to the same level, while the protruding elements are lined up by the depth of the field, with accentuating, favorable results. The face, the figure, the attitude, are identical here: but the two photographs are profoundly different.
A mechanical explanation is offered, concerning, that is, the ability of lenses to bring the viewer up close to something or farther away from it, to reduce or to enlarge the field. Instead, the explanation should be understood in a linguistic sense: using a wide-angle or a telephoto lens to reproduce the same image means already offering two different interpretations. In the former, the face will be distorted in the manner of a caricature, because the parts in the foreground will appear to be larger than would be the case were a normal lens to be used, while the more distant parts will be fleeting or even eliminated. In the latter image all the elements are brought to the same level, while the protruding elements are lined up by the depth of the field, with accentuating, favorable results. The face, the figure, the attitude, are identical here: but the two photographs are profoundly different.
The second photography book by Fox Talbot, published in 1845, is called Images of Scotland created by sunlight.
Untaken Photo.
Choosing to print a photograph in one format rather than another means […] adding something to that image. In other words, a photograph is not printed very small or average sized or very large at random. The reasons why the photographer chooses
a specific format are often very personal ones. I have always loved photos that measure 30×40, hence, slightly larger, as a basic format. But I’ve also noticed how the most sophisticated American photographers use small formats that usually range from 13×18 to 18×24. Photographers in the past, because they printed their photographic plates as big as possible, had formats that were, let’s say, 24×30 or 18×24, while young photographers who work with small-format cameras seem to not want to enlarge their images too much to avoid emphasizing them, and to keep from losing the compactness of the material; this also avoids the grain and everything that the grain can involve in terms of a game or deception or decoration, and so on. So I thought of an image that could sort of express the idea of what this format is. The most elementary thing would be to take the photograph of a person’s head, starting from an ID photo, and enlarge it until it’s 50×60, but that would be banal. I don’t know why. After all, from an ordinary idea you can achieve a result that is not at all ordinary. But I wanted the format, not the photograph, to be the key player here. In other words, in this case the head would be the key player of the process, while I instead wanted it to clearly be the format, not the photograph. What I mean is that this is why I decided to take the picture of one of those modern buildings that resemble beehives where the windows are one right next to the other divided by a light concrete framework and there is no architectural variation between each of the elements. These are fully-fledged multiples, the multiple of a window. Between one window and the entire building only the format changes: i.e. the building is the result of the format of that window multiplied 100, 200, 1,000 times depending on the floors, the size of the building. So I started enlarging the photograph of this house to the biggest format possible, 50×60, and I did so in a way that the viewer would neither be able to see where the house began, nor where it ended, nor the two sides. In other words, all they could see were the windows, as though there were a wall of windows, thus suggesting that this particular format could continue endlessly. Then, without ever lowering the enlarger, that is, keeping the image the same size, I began adding the smaller-sized paper that is readily available, 40×50, 30×40, 24×30, 18×24, 13×18, postcard format, ID format, and the only thing that changed was the number of windows. But one element was always constant: the constructive module of the image, in other words, the window. The only thing that changed was the format. I don’t know whether this process is clear and if it is so to what extent, but when I saw the image I really liked it. I especially liked the idea of placing these pictures one next to another in scale, thus shaping this strange object.
[…] But there’s one other important thing. Perhaps the format makes sense precisely because of this, the fact that at a certain point quantity becomes quality. By now, this has become a common rule that stems, I think, from Marxist theory, that is, the so-called leap in quality: i.e. two workers are very different from 100,000 workers. They are still workers and taken one by one they have the same value. But put together they become something else, not only because they acquire physical strength, but because they also acquire experience. What I mean to say is that this is what format might be, this increase in quantity that, at a certain point, leads to the well-known leap in quality. Well, let’s just say it, it really doesn’t make much difference, but it’s one thing to have 10 rooms available and another to have 10,000, even if the windows are all the same.
from Ugo Mulas. Immagini e testi, edited by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Università di Parma, 1973.
Photo not taken.
It shows an interior, the studio of a sculptor. Around him ordinary objects, bottles, tools, newspapers. He seems to belong to this space naturally, in spite of his individuality. Actually, his individuality stands out because he is placed in a precise, recognisable context. A significant relationship connects the sculptor with the objects. Little by little the things around him, which defined his environment and give it scale, disappear thanks to the use of lenses with an ever-greater focal length. The result is that the figure, alienated from his space and time, acquires an almost mythic, idealised quality.
It shows an interior, the studio of a sculptor. Around him ordinary objects, bottles, tools, newspapers. He seems to belong to this space naturally, in spite of his individuality. Actually, his individuality stands out because he is placed in a precise, recognisable context. A significant relationship connects the sculptor with the objects. Little by little the things around him, which defined his environment and give it scale, disappear thanks to the use of lenses with an ever-greater focal length. The result is that the figure, alienated from his space and time, acquires an almost mythic, idealised quality.
It is Man Ray who indicates an architectural picture simulating a frame on a wall. The picture in itself says nothing, or else it says too many things. I took the exposure as Man Ray was telling a joke; as he points to the empty and framed space, the painter says: “ça, c’est mon dernier tableau.” (Look, this is my last picture).
The image tells us nothing of the genre, because the photo was suggested, not by the visual situation, by Man Ray’s making a gesture or taking a certain pose, as by his words. In short, I took a picture of a phrase. But this can only be seen by introducing the phrase in the photo, that is, by putting its caption inside it. This is, after all, confirmed by Man Ray himself, who does not indicate a painting, but rather utters a sentence that is his painting: the sentence is both Man Ray’s artwork and my photograph.
The image tells us nothing of the genre, because the photo was suggested, not by the visual situation, by Man Ray’s making a gesture or taking a certain pose, as by his words. In short, I took a picture of a phrase. But this can only be seen by introducing the phrase in the photo, that is, by putting its caption inside it. This is, after all, confirmed by Man Ray himself, who does not indicate a painting, but rather utters a sentence that is his painting: the sentence is both Man Ray’s artwork and my photograph.
I wanted to go back to the theme of the self-portrait, of the photographer’s face either erased or imprecise. Here, on the same photogram. The photograph shows Nini and me. Nini is in focus, I am out of focus. She is in focus because I was the one taking her picture, that was how I saw her and that is how I wanted to see her, because I always want to see with the utmost clarity what is before me, and taking pictures is seeing and wanting to see, first and foremost. My face is out of focus because, there is only one thing in the tangible world that mankind, “who can see themselves as they look,” according to Merleau-Ponty, cannot see of themselves: their face.
At most we can offer a rough idea through the memory of other photographs, the narcissism of a reflecting surface, a few casual references, but the image will remain indistinct, blurred.
When the photographer leaves the camera after having adjusted it so he can move to another place, this reality does not change and he continues to be unable to see himself. By adjusting the focus he can clearly see what is around him, and he can see it with great clarity, but his face is absent in the lens. Placing a mirror before the camera is naive, because the dialogue is between me and the camera, and not between the camera and the mirror.
At most we can offer a rough idea through the memory of other photographs, the narcissism of a reflecting surface, a few casual references, but the image will remain indistinct, blurred.
When the photographer leaves the camera after having adjusted it so he can move to another place, this reality does not change and he continues to be unable to see himself. By adjusting the focus he can clearly see what is around him, and he can see it with great clarity, but his face is absent in the lens. Placing a mirror before the camera is naive, because the dialogue is between me and the camera, and not between the camera and the mirror.
At a certain point I considered the Verifications finished, complete, and I decided to end them where it had all begun. In some degree, I did what the engraver does when he marks an ‘X’ on the plate when the edition is finished: the glass, which is of crucial importance for my composition offers precise physical and visual characteristics to the piece, and, once it has been broken, it is the process itself that cannot be repeated. The result of my gesture was a new image, different with respect to the initial one. And this radical break with what came before led me to think about the intrinsic meaning of the Homage to Niépce, it led me to think about Duchamp; and not only because of the extrinsic circumstance that in Duchamp’s output there is one work that consists of a large broken pane of glass.
I became aware, that is, of the influence, perhaps unwittingly, of Duchamp’s approach, of his not doing, that has been so important to the more recent art, and without which this part of my work would never have been born. Hence, this photograph is dedicated to his presence.
I became aware, that is, of the influence, perhaps unwittingly, of Duchamp’s approach, of his not doing, that has been so important to the more recent art, and without which this part of my work would never have been born. Hence, this photograph is dedicated to his presence.
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