Black & White E-Book

Nazzareno Luigi Todarello

• Herausgeber: latorre editore
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

On reading these pages of mine, in the end, I have the impression I have not come up with anything. Anything conclusive and “true”. I wish I had, but I do think I have not succeeded. If, as Shopenhauer says, “the philosopher becomes such through a doubt he tries to escape”, I am not a “philosopher of photography” because I have escaped no doubt. Anyway I do not think I have wasted time. And I do not think he who will read them, these few pages, will waste his time. The themes dealt with using my elementary means are of great significance. I have tried to make sense of my photographic experiences, above all because, through thinking, I wanted to realize what I had done. Maybe trying is already a sort of truth. I have tried to relate things that I have always confusedly considered in relation. Time, light and photography. Knowledge and look. Philosophy and photography. Photography is something (what exactly I have not understood yet) which pays for its simplicity of use and its astonishing diffusion with a generalized underestimation. Two French authors, Sartre and Barthes, have really given me a lot to think about. Photographing moves me. Knowing deeply means only loving, that is becoming one, or living in the desire to become one. Photographing for me has always been and is a way of knowing, and therefore of loving.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

PHOTOGRAPHY AND TIME

PRESENT AND PAST

LIGHT

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART 1

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART 2

COLOUR AND BLACK AND WHITE 1

PORTRAIT

(Senza titolo)

LOVER’S HANDS

THE EYES OF PORTA GENOVA

THE THEATRE OF LIFE

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THEATRE

THE SILENCE OF LIGHT

THE SILENCE OF THINGS

PHOTOGRAPHY AND DEATH

ABSENCE/ESSENCE

ABSENCE AND PLACES

SACRED SYMBOLS

(Senza titolo)

OPENING THE SHADOWS

PHOTOGRAPHY AND KNOWLEDGE 1

VENICE AND INNOCENT LOOK

MURANO AND THE LIGHT OF BLACK

LANDSCAPE

COLOUR AND BLACK AND WHITE 2

(Senza titolo)

PHOTOGRAPHY AND KNOWLEDGE 2

THE MATERIAL REALITY

(Senza titolo)

THE METAPHYSICS OF LIGHT

DRINK THE LIGHT

NAZZARENO LUIGI TODARELLO

BLACK & WHITE

Metaphysics

of Photography

Copyright 2019 Latorre Editore

Italy

www.latorre-editore.it

On reading these pages of mine, in the end, I have the impression I have not come up with anything. Anything conclusive and “true”. I wish I had, but I do think I have not succeeded. If, as Shopenhauer says, “the philosopher becomes such through a doubt he tries to escape”, I am not a “philosopher of photography” because I have escaped no doubt. Anyway I do not think I have wasted time. And I do not think he who will read them, these few pages, will waste his time. The themes dealt with using my elementary means are of great significance. I have tried to make sense of my photographic experiences, above all because, through thinking, I wanted to realize what I had done. Maybe trying is already a sort of truth. I have tried to relate things that I have always confusedly considered in relation. Time, light and photography. Knowledge and look. Philosophy and photography. Photography is something (what exactly I have not understood yet) which pays for its simplicity of use and its astonishing diffusion with a generalized underestimation. Two French authors, Sartre and Barthes, have really given me a lot to think about. Photographing moves me. Knowing deeply means only loving, that is becoming one, or living in the desire to become one. Photographing for me has always been and is a way of knowing, and therefore of loving.

How can we admire the firefly?

It produces light.

It produces light by itself.

It does not reflect the sunlight.

We cannot see it during the day.

In the night, what we see is all its light.

Round a bend, driving down from Molare to the provincial road,

suddenly,

in front of my eyes, just there, I saw a real sea of small lights.

A swaying hollow of fireflies that were after one another.

It had never happened to me.

After getting off the car, I was wrapped up by the silence of the night.

I saw the twinkling stars. I saw the quivering fireflies

That were launching their signal.

I felt as if I was the witness of a nocturnal ritual.

A magical ritual, celebrated in the immense space,

In the silence of the night,

Unknown to men.

I had the feeling of witnessing Shiva’s dance.

The everlasting dance that generates the world.

The great lights and the tiny lights looked in communion to me

Portions of the same reality.

The deepest reality.

The reality from which everything comes: light.

I am not interested in surprising photography.

I am interested in the essence of photography.

The reason why, in the light, something “here and now” is generated

Inside a wider space and a wider time.

Of photography I love its modesty, its acceptance of the maidservant’s function without protest.

Maybe our age takes lots of pictures to anaesthetize itself.

If you look at it attentively, that is for a long time, photography seizes the eyes, forces the look, the thought,

the time, the melancholy.

Now

by continuously taking pictures,

by watching the photo immediately and forgetting about it an instant later and forever, of photography we sever the inner essence, which is spectrum essence.

The sound belongs to man. It exists only upon the earth. The light belongs to the universe, to the stars, to God.

Now I, like the child of long ago, in summer, who ran home with his little box full of fireflies, now I run home with my compact, point-and-shoot camera, my bundle of light.

Is not the camera but a little magic box that can capture the light in a particular moment and “keep” it ? The camera sensor is always in the dark. There is a cap that closes the camera lens. Then I open it and the sensor, filled with light, vibrates in every part. Each of its millions of pixels catches its ray. A quiver, a swarm, like a wave of fireflies.

In photography colour is, almost always, stupid.

Dedicated

to my mother

to my father

PHOTOGRAPHY AND TIME

In the movie Smoke, the protagonist Auggi Wren (interpreted by Harvey Keitel) is a tobacconist who for years has shot a photo at the crossing opposite his shop at eight o’clock sharp every morning. Same time, same position of the camera. Paul Benjamin (interpreted by William Hurt) is the friend who is shown the photos printed and set in order on an album: he is puzzled. “They are all… the same”. “They are - says Auggi - four thousand photos of the same place. The corner between the Third and the Seventh at eight o’clock in the morning. Four thousand days in any possible weather. That’s why I don’t go on holiday. I must be here every morning at the same time. Every morning, same place, same time”. “I’ve never seen anything like this”. “It’s my project…what you can call the job of my life”. “Crazy… I’m not sure I’ve understood… How did you get the idea of this project?”. “I don’t know, it just came. After all it’s my corner. Well, it’s a small portion of the world, but here too things happen as they do anywhere else. It’s the documentation of my corner”. “It’s a bit like an obsession” he has a quick look through the albums, smiling with presumptuousness. “You’ll never understand it if you don’t slow down, my friend”. “What do you mean?”. “I mean you move too fast, you don’t even look at the photos”. “But… they are all the same”. “They are all the same, but each is different from the others. There are sunny mornings and sombre mornings. There are summer lights and autumn lights, weekdays and weekends. There are people wearing raincoats and overshoes and people wearing T-shirts and shorts. Sometimes the same people, sometimes different people. Different people sometimes turn the same and the same people disappear. The earth goes round the sun and every day the light of the sun strikes the earth from a different angle”. “Slower, you say?”. “That’s what I suggest. You know how it is: tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow… time keeps its rhythm”. Paul looks at Auggi as if he saw him the first time. He looks at the photos again, more slowly, he concentrates on the images. He looks at them, one at a time, carefully, slowly. In the meantime we too, we the spectators, watch the photos with him, slowly, “all the same” but “each different from the others”. The same street corner, the same crossing, but the faces of the pedestrians always different. Different people, different clothes, different hairstyles, different expressions against the background that never changes. The again we see the two friends siting at the same table. Paul is slowly going through the pages of the albums and Auggi is smoking and looking at him. “Gosh - says Paul - Look: that’s Ellen”. “Yes, that’s Ellen. There are many wither that year. She was probably on her way to work”. “That’s Ellen… look at her my love…”. We too can see the photos of Ellen in a slow zooming. Then we see Paul weeping. Auggi puts his hand on his shoulder. We understand Ellen has been dead for some time.

Therefore when you look at a portrait the question is: what is its relationship between what happened before and after? How does it broaden in one sense and the other?

Photography is a form of magic. Like magic it comes into contact with the nature of things and of people. It catches its bright aura. It absorbs its spirit of light and draws “the marks of time” with it.

Among the arts, photography is the one which is the most intrinsically tied to life. Mediation is very slight. There is transparency. The event almost offers itself spontaneously.

Aren’t copies of reality useless? Millions of them are shot every day. We look at these intrusive companions of our life with presumptuousness. But any photo, even the least artistic, contains a fragment of mystery, the mystery of time and of light.

Photography creates a “dramatic” relationship between the observer’s present and the past represented by the photo.

Unknown, Teresa Cosentino e Pasquale Todarello on their wedding day,1948. In his play “Our Town” ( I staged it twice, but I would like to stage it once more) Thornton Wilder tells of a young woman, Emily, who dies in childbirth in the prime of life. She finds herself among the souls of the dead who preceded her. A soul among souls. Her desire to live is still so passionate that she is allowed to come back to the world of the living. The other dead advise her against going back there. You will suffer too much, they say to her. No, I won’t; she answers, I will choose a special day, the one of my twelfth birthday, I will be happy. Her wish is so intense that it is fulfilled. She finds herself among her relatives, her father, her mother, her brother. All wish her happy birthday. She gets some presents. They are in their own time, they do not know she is dead. She is not yet. On the contrary she knows she is dead and is in the “past”. What for her is irremediably the past, for those she loves is the “present”. She, Emily; suffers from the way they live their lives as if nothing had happened. They look at her as if nothing had happened, with natural love, “nothing more”. She would like something special, a more intense, more conscious look. The fact is that she has already experienced how all this is bound to end. They have not. “They are so young, so beautiful! Why must they get old and die?”. Before the day is over Emily decides return among the dead. You cannot go back. And you cannot convince the living to share the anxiety for life of the dead.

Unknown, portrait of Teresa Cosentino,1950. When I watch this photo lots of questions crowd into my mind. Questions the mind asks the heart. And vice versa. What is and what was the relationship between me and this young woman? What does it mean (how is it possible?): she is there, beautiful, before every event known to me (felt by me), just married…and I am much older than she is. I that was born of her. I that in a short time would be living inside her body. What is the relationship (how is it possible there is a relationship?) between this young woman and the woman that was my mother? Are they the same person? Of course they are. Are they different persons? Of course they are. There was a period when we were strangers. I was not there. I might not even have been in any time. She might have changed her life, because of any unpredictable event. Or have died before my birth. Or we might, perhaps, have met on other occasions. If I were born from another woman? She might, perhaps, have been my sister. Or my girlfriend. In his booklet “Camera lucida”, full of beautiful things, Roland Barthes speaks of “wound”. It is like that. A wound is what ties myself to that young woman. Now. When she was alive I looked at this photo as a document from a time far away, with little emotion. There was no emotion. There was no wound. It was not there yet. The wound was opened after her death. What happened to the photo of her twenty years at the moment of her death? It became a wound, the photo itself. Time hit. Time that does not speak, imperious with naturalness, uncontrollable and incomprehensible, beyond any possibility of intervention by myself. A wound that does not heal. That Time still makes bleeding. A wound that is waiting for me and that will silently heal, forever, only the day when I enter it.

Unknown, Portrait of Teresa Cosentino, 1970. Every photo is a question without an answer. It is a non-answer. Because it says but does not explain. It feels it is like this. It realizes it is like this but cannot go any further, it cannot describing, narrating reasoning. In conclusion, it does not reach the “why”, indissolubly tied to its “how”. It is a promise which is not kept. Because, even if it is a painful manifestation of Time, it does not imply flowing. It has no before and no after. It does not care about events. The photo, every photo, looks at me from the sidereal superiority of its exist where Time does not flow.

Two certain times with unquestionable existence. “It is” and “It was” make contact and create a short circuit called “emotion of time”.

Photography has not but one subject, Time.

No painting, however realistic, can demonstrate with absolute certainty that the person portrayed has really existed. 

The photographer’s gesture is simple. Also the technical concept is simple. And yet, as time goes by, every photo becomes a mysterious object. In front of every old portrait, the incredulous question is always: “has it really been” like this? Observing, with renewed wonder, the beloved person’s face as it was before our birth is one of the most emotional experiences. It generates a “feeling of time” which was impossible before photography.

In the meantime, to avoid any confusion, we must first of all separate the support (paper, screen, etc.), which allows the vision, from the photo itself, which is… what is it? The luminous trail of an event which happened, precisely, in the light. The substance of the photo travels with me in time, it is ‘present’ to me.

The fact radiant-light is motionless. Myself and its material support draw away from it without end.

The present is immediately transformed into past and into document of the past. In the sense that the photo is evidence of the fact that there was a present which became past in the instant itself of the photo shoot. It informs that every “present” instant exists because it “goes by”. Photography is an euphoric, skipping art, but it is also inner and tragic.