from: L'avventura di un fotografo. In “Gli amori difficili”. (First edition 1993). Special edition for GEDI Gruppo Editoriale S.p.A., 2020, under licence of Mondadori Libri S.p.A. Milano. P. 48-49
For once you have started - he preached
- there's no reason for you to stop. The gap between the reality
which is taken in a picture because it appears beautiful to us
and the reality that appears beautiful to us because it was taken
in a picture is very short. If you take Pierluca while he is building
a sandcastle, there is no reason not to take him while he cries
because the castle has collapsed, and then while his baby-sitter
gives him comfort by making him find a shell in the sand. As soon
as you start saying about something: “Oh, how beautiful,
we really should take a picture of it!” and you are already
on the field of those who think that everything which is not photographed
is lost, that it's like if it never existed, and that therefore
to genuinely live you must photograph as much as you can, and
to photograph as much as you can you must: either live in the
most photographable way possible, or consider every single moment
of your life as photographable. The first way leads to stupidity,
the second to insanity.
- You must be insane and stupid, - his friends said to him, -
and what's more, a nuisance.
- For those who want to recover
everything that passes before their eyes, - Antonino explained
even if no one was listening to him anymore, - the only way to
act coherently is to take at least one photo a minute, from the
moment he opens his eyes in the morning until he goes to sleep.
Only in this way will the rolls of exposed film make a faithful
diary of our days, without anything being left out. If I started
taking pictures, I would go all the way down this road, at the
risk of losing my mind. You instead even demand to make a choice.
But which choice? A choice in an idyllic, apologetic sense, of
consolation, of peace with nature, the nation and relatives. Your
choice is not just a photographic choice; it is a life choice,
which leads you to exclude dramatic contrasts, the knots of contradictions,
the great tensions of will, of passion, of aversion. So you think
you can save yourselves from madness, but you fall into mediocrity,
into obtuseness.
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