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Privacy - Secret Portraits |
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| 05/12/2010 |
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For the 20th anniversary of the Courmayeur Noir in Festival we thought to create something that could remain over time, bearing witness to a genre that perhaps we contributed in some way to launching in our country, and which has certainly grown with us. We asked a photographer specialized in architecture and anthropology, Francesco Galli, to lend us his unique vision for the dynamics of places and people that interact with them, to create portraits of Italian noir writers at work, in their houses, in their studios.
The result can be seen starting December 7 at Courmayeur’s Museo Transfrontaliero, in the first part of the exhibit Privacy - Secret Portraits, which will be amplified with photos from the current festival. The final exhibit, and an accompanying catalogue, will be presented at Valle d’Aosta in early 2011 and then taken to other cities in Italy and abroad.
Francesco Galli entered the privates spaces of 27 of Italy’s leading contemporary genre writers, to create a noir gallery of “secret portraits” that are accompanied by texts from the writers which can be heard on the Radio2 show Tutti i colori del giallo, hosted by Luca Crovi, which during the festival will be broadcasting live from Courmayeur.
The writers of the exhibit are Sergio Altieri, Gianni Biondillo, Elisabetta Bucciarelli, Pino Cacucci, Gianrico Carofiglio, Piero Colaprico, Sandrone Dazieri, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Davide Dileo (Boosta), Andrea Camilleri, Massimo Carlotto, Giorgio Faletti, Carlo Lucarelli, Marcello Fois, Leonardo Gori, Francesco Guccini, Carmen Iarrera, Loriano Macchiavelli, Alessandro Perissinotto, Santo Piazzese, Tommaso Pincio, Andrea G. Pinketts, Gaetano Savatteri, Piero Soria, Valerio Varesi, Marco Vichi and Simona Vinci.
“I began with the idea that the act of writing cannot be fixed in a single image like a thought, it is invisible to photography. So I take a step back and imagine seeing the writer from behind, sitting at his or her desk. Whether they use a pen, keyboard or a noisy Olivetti typewriter, my attention begins traveling throughout the surrounding environment. As the writer concentrates on his/her writing, I count. How many books, paintings, chairs, animals, plants, cigarette butts and objects are there? From a wall, an African mask stares at me…or a Sicilian marionette. On a shelf I spy antique binoculars, the kind used at the theatre, or a 1940s Leica […].
“From the window I see a courtyard, a tree-lined street, the sea, a supermarket parking lot, the fog. Through a French window I walk out onto a terrace, where I find an old iron table painted white with two chairs. I turn back and can see the writer, she stares at me without seeing me, as I were one of the many cats wandering through the nearby rooftops. In another house I can’t help but focus on a collection of electric guitars that evoke mysteries of bygone pop stars. As soon as I enter a sunny apartment I see a lace curtain that blows in the wind over a breathtaking landscape, as its inhabitant searches through a drawer for a secret. Another writer descends the staircase and out the front door, under porticos, towards a newspaper stand. Yet another agrees to be photographed with a skull, just like the one in Hamlet.
“In their silence, a universe of things tell stories about their owners, clues that measure these professional solitary souls. Some portraits are frontal close-ups, others are of the writers from behind, with only a chair between myself and them; they are defenseless. I am somewhat of a victim of these writers – they should not realize that an alien eye is capturing the phenomenology of their habitat.” [Francesco Galli]
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