I look at the many photographs that Sandro Scalia has taken in Palermo over almost a decade. What I see is not one city but many; not one photographic vision but many. Not only many subjects, but many visions, shifting and provisional. Strips, rectangles, fragments in colour and in black and white which, rather than managing to contain the city, chase after it as it slips away and changes. \u2014\u2014\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Focus on Italy \u2014<\/strong> Giovanna Calvenzi<\/p>\n\n\n\n At first glance one might suppose that this 2001 survey is organised around three main currents: photojournalism, the great tradition of reinterpreting the landscape, and the most recent experiences. However \u2013 and this is perhaps the distinctive feature of the photographers in this selection \u2013 the rigid division suggested by belonging to one of the possible \u201cgenres\u201d dissolves in the use of interweaving languages, which make such subdivisions artificial and merely convenient. As indeed it should be when the \u201cwhole\u201d under consideration is a reality in constant evolution, freely borrowing languages from other genres, questioning new realities, and springing from a deep culture which, as such, cannot belong to a single narrative style. Nevertheless, to make the creative path and the context of the photographers presented more explicit, it seemed appropriate to trace very brief itineraries defining the cultural spheres in which they have worked and continue to work. For specific historical reasons, Italian photojournalism developed above all after the Second World War. In the years when illustrated magazines were being born and reborn, an intense amateur photographic activity was also taking root, embracing the linguistic roots of Neorealism and of the French and Anglo-Saxon traditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The group exhibition \u201cView from Abroad. World Capitals photographed by postwar Italian photographers\u201d presents sixteen photographers who, professionally or as amateurs, worked in different styles and with contrasting impulses, yet were bound together by their enthusiasm for travel and for the discoveries that the photographic medium made possible. Letizia Battaglia<\/strong> presents the extraordinary testimony of her civic commitment against the Mafia. Working for the photographic department of a Sicilian daily newspaper, Letizia Battaglia<\/strong> for years she photographed the massacres, everyday life in a city besieged by fear, the opposition, the citizens\u2019 courageous battle against a monster with a thousand branches. With poetic, heartrending, committed photography, she bore witness to the growing awareness of the people of Palermo and used photography in a courageous war against omert\u00e0 and death. Ivo Saglietti<\/strong> e Paolo Pellegrin<\/strong> are photojournalists in the noblest and most engaged sense of the term. Amid the short-sightedness of the Italian press and publishing industry, which allows very little room for analytical, in-depth photojournalism, both have courageously and quite independently undertaken long-term projects of denunciation and commitment, which are now presented to the public in a comprehensive way for the first time. Ivo Saglietti<\/strong> has devoted himself to tracing the legacy of slavery in Africa. \u201cKosovo\u201d by Paolo Pellegrin<\/strong>, one of the most interesting photographers of the latest international generation, is a project carried out over more than two years, a harsh and heartfelt testimony against the stupidity of all wars. The tradition of the new Italian landscape photography, by contrast, has a recent history. Its high point perhaps dates back to 1984, the year in which Luigi Ghirri<\/strong> conceived and presented to the public the exhibition \u201cViaggio in Italia\u201d, a group show of photographers who expressed a new awareness in reading the landscape. A noble and ancient landscape, profoundly altered from the post-war period onwards by speculation and by the inability to manage a conscious and necessary transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cseason\u201d of the Italian landscape first involved photographers and then the public authorities themselves, which increasingly began to commission photographers to survey the architectural and urban heritage of many cities. Luigi Ghirri<\/strong>, Guido Guidi<\/strong>, Vincenzo Castella<\/strong> (each of them is featured in \u201cFocus on Italy\u201d) are among the protagonists of this extraordinary creative flowering, varied in its themes and languages, which was to influence Italian and European photography for at least two decades. It is therefore of great interest to see, alongside the solo shows by Ghirri<\/strong>, Castella and Guidi<\/strong> , \u201cLo spirito dei luoghi\u201d (The Spirit of Places), the most recent photographic campaign commissioned by the Piedmont Region. Four different photographers, with complementary experiences and languages, reinterpreting Turin\u2019s architectural heritage (Mimmo Jodice<\/strong>), the mountain and hill country (Roberto Bossaglia<\/strong>), industrial and craft activities (Mauro Raffini<\/strong>) and the waterscape (Bruna Biamino<\/strong>). Sandro Scalia<\/strong>, who presents \u201cLe citt\u00e0 di Palermo\u201d, fully belongs to the current of the new landscape photographers, although he has relinquished faith in the descriptive power of photography in favour of a more dreamlike use of it: his is not a narrative faithful to reality but rather a \u201ccollection of scattered signs\u201d, sedimented traces, the possible faces of the many layered cities that inhabit Palermo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreno Gentili<\/strong> instead offers a selection of images tracing his narrative itinerary. His reality is urban, born from a direct and painful confrontation with the deep body of cities, filtered through his oblique, sometimes reiterated gaze, which descends into the folds of the sufferings of contemporary life and work in an attempt to lay bare their essence. Mario Giacomelli<\/strong> needs no introduction. A great poet of the image, he was discovered by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as early as the 1950s. A forerunner of new languages, a refined bard of poverty and suffering, a sensitive interpreter of the graphic patterns of the Marche landscape, he died this year, leaving Italian photography orphaned of a great master.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The influence that contemporary art has exerted on traditional photography has shifted dramatically \u2013 as never before these recent years \u2013 the field of research of photography, which has always revolved around the pairing of document and interpretation and has now discovered boundaries that can no longer be measured. Representing the trends of contemporary Italian photography is a group exhibition, \u201cStudio Marangoni\u2019s Faculty Show\u201d. Eleven teachers from the Studio Marangoni in Florence explore traditional techniques (photomontage, pinhole), languages and narrative codes, and tackle landscape, gesture, feelings, social icons, visual wandering… Eleven ways of rereading reality, of interpreting it, manipulating it, transforming it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is it possible \u2013 and is it possible today \u2013 to photograph a city, to define its identity through organised images?
I leave the computer, get up, go to my bookcase and once again take down from the shelf Invisible Cities<\/em> by Italo Calvino, a book I have very often consulted in trying to understand the complexity of the city. I look at the table of contents, which reveals the scheme Calvino devised, structured in chapters and themes and in short pieces that open and close it: a montage through which the writer – perhaps more thinker than writer, as Calvino sometimes was – tries to \u201cmeasure\u201d the problem. Another book immediately comes to mind, Penser\/Classer (Thinking\/Sorting)<\/em> by Georges Perec, a friend of Calvino\u2019s and, like him, obsessed with the question of whether or not it is possible to narrate, whether or not it is possible to describe, and like him close to photography and its mechanisms.
A labyrinth. The city appears as a labyrinth bristling with places, spaces of history and nature in dialogue or in conflict with one another, desires, concepts, fears, symbols, layers of meaning. In his introduction Calvino writes: \u201c\u2026.there was a period when I compared cities to the starry sky, and another period when I always found myself talking about the rubbish that spills out of the everyday city\u201d. He speaks of a visionary traveller who \u201ctells of impossible cities, for example a microscopic city that keeps expanding and turns out to be made up of many concentric cities in expansion, a spider-web city suspended over an abyss, or a two-dimensional city like Moriana\u201d. Finally, among many other things, he tells us that what Marco Polo cares about is \u201cdiscovering the secret reasons that have led people to live in cities\u201d.
Palermo is one of many possible cities.
A photographer of the past would have tried to dig out its identity, still confident in the descriptive power of photography and in its ability to adhere to reality and to narrate it. A photographer of today, as Sandro Scalia is, lets the images flow over Palermo\u2019s complex identity, aware that photography is nothing more than a way of gathering scattered signs: traces of the many things that present themselves to the photographer\u2019s eye.
We know that the photographer is a great walker; he is at times the fl\u00e2neur<\/em> Walter Benjamin speaks of: he wanders through the places of the city while living pieces of his own life, gathering fragments and fixing them, eager or pensive.
Sometimes he measures space, sometimes he tries to reconcile the time he perceives outside himself with the time that flows within him. This, ultimately, is what the photographer does.
In Palermo Scalia has composed several cities, different places in which we encounter children, new urban developments, markets, gardens, church interiors, women with an Arab gaze, skies, funfairs, the port, the sea, large apartment blocks, graffiti, historic palaces in decline, squares, cars. Colour and black and white, different formats. Yet this is not simply a difference of \u201csubjects\u201d or techniques, but of continual shifts in vision, as we were saying, and in the photographer\u2019s own experience. They are different discourses, as if each time the photographer had different people in front of him and chose ever new voices with which to respond to the variety of theirs. Almost an instability, a tremor, induced by the city itself.
Such is Scalia\u2019s Palermo: elusive – like every city – and at the same time present.
The key to reaching the heart that is nonetheless hidden in these different Palermos lies, I believe, in seeking out the many signs that charge Scalia\u2019s photographs: dense or scattered, distributed across the horizontality of the panoramic format, organised in more usual rectangular formats or gathered within the square (it is impossible not to perceive the variations in the field of vision that the photographer constantly proposes to us), it is precisely the signs that we must observe in order to attempt an approach to the city. We will then read many stories within a single image, many worlds that have overlapped and settled in layers, stories of people, of societies, of nature, stories so complex, ancient and then contemporary, that they cannot be contained in a classic sequence, in a compact, traditional narrative.
These stories lie rather in the tangled branches of a bush by the sea, in the substance of the stones of the port, in the grass growing out of the paving of a square, in the proximity of road signs and youthful graffiti, in the filigree of hanging sausages, in the texture of parked motorbikes and of fish piled on the market stall, in the hollow eye sockets of skulls that resemble the gilded decorations of churches, the embroidery of coloured festival lights, the tangles of ancient plant roots, and resemble the stains on peeling walls and the yellow dogs asleep in the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sandroscalia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/FOTO1CORRETTA-1-1536x568.jpg.webp\")
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