M i n i m a l i a
Alessandro Fumera © Copyright 2021 - All rights reserved
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Photographs and contents of this website are protected by copyright. Their use without formal authorization, even for non-commercial purposes, is a violation of the current regulations and is punishable accordingly. Any action aimed at violating this copyright is not only illegal, but also useless: the photographs published here are chosen and reproduced in such a way as to always allow the author to prove their authorship.
- LEGAL NOTICES -
Photographs and contents of this website are protected by copyright. Their use without formal authorization, even for non-commercial purposes, is a violation of regulations in force and can be punished pursuant to them. Any action aimed at infringing this copyright is not only illegal, but also useless: the photographs published here have been selected and reproduced in such a way as to allow the author to always prove his authorship.
inside the image
peripheries of the gaze
In my photos the subjects are everyday ones, they belong to our habitual field of vision, they are images we are used to passively enjoying.
Isolated from the usual context of the surrounding reality, photographically re-presented in a different context, these images reveal themselves to be charged with a new meaning.
Luigi Ghirri
At times the urge to write leaves me, I get the impression that it's useless to note down everything I see, because this is a fiction like all the others.
But then I think of those who fix everything with their know-it-all attitude, they only believe what they've read in their books and newspapers, and treat this whole world with condescension, because they hate feeling lost, exposed to the randomness of appearances.
If you have the feeling you understand everything, you lose the desire to observe.
I must stop being distrustful, observe what repeats itself day after day for no reason, the most unremarkable of spectacles.
Gianni Celati (Verso la foce, 1989)
I am still in that phase where everything I see has a value precisely because I don't know what value to give it.
When everything has found an order and a place in my mind, I will begin to find nothing worthy of note, to no longer see what I see anymore.
Because to see means to perceive the differences, and as soon as the differences become uniform in the predictable everyday, the gaze glides over a smooth and gripless surface.
Italo Calvino (The old lady in the purple kimono, in Collection of Sand - The Shape of Time, 1984)
I feel I am able to grasp a certain quality of things.
It is something imperceptible, almost embarrassing, but I am convinced that there are things no one would see if I didn't photograph them.
Diane Arbus
The representation of the "grim" is that of the "first impression", it works through formal aestheticizations, resorts to conventional devices to achieve a strong emotional impact on those who experience it.
Through this cognitive approach, the process of encountering the other seems, at a certain point, to come to a halt.
Perhaps, in this way, the other has nothing more to offer us: it is as if we take away their voice.
The "aesthetics of listening", on the other hand, is a slower, unfinished exploration.
The encounter with the "other", in this case, takes the form of an astonished investigation, which lets the represented subject speak and lets them speak forever.
Paola Pennisi
Poor photography is not so much a concrete act, but an attitude.
It means opening the doors, the windows of your home and looking down.
Proceeding in concentric circles, starting from where you live, from your own neighborhood, then widening the radius to the whole city, the region, and beyond.
It is the way we look at the world and at human beings, the care we put into what we do, that truly matters.
This is where poor photography is situated, somewhere between the soul, the heart, and instinct.
And it is “poor” because it is out of step, perhaps out of fashion, but strong enough to stand on its own feet.
It does not look at the latest camera model, the most high-performing lens, but is committed to observing everything that the eye and senses can grasp, to fill a void, calm a pain, befriend the demons that each of us has inside.
It is honest because it is deeply ours.
So-called “marginality” should not be a problem. It is, in fact, the possibility of being independent, of not adhering to any trend or fashion, of not settling by becoming someone you are not.
Francesco Faraci (Nomadic soul. From Pasolini to poor photography, 2022)
Walk around on foot, without a destination or schedule.
Choose your route step by step not based on what you know, but on what you see around you.
You must be estranged and look at everything as if it were the first time.
You must perceive space as a unified whole and let yourself be attracted by the details.
Guy Debord (Theory of the Dérive, 1956)
The jobs under the house are the most difficult because, while everything outside the house seems strange, interesting, under the house everything appears normal.
Tano D'Amico (Orphans of the Wind. The Autumn of the Gypsies, 2022)
The convention of perspective organized the visual field as if that were actually the ideal, making the observing eye the center of everything,
Every drawing or painting that used perspective suggested to the viewer that they were the only center of the world.
The camera demonstrates that the center does not exist.
John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972)
Placing something in relation to a center matters little, if by giving up doing so I can suddenly embrace its form, as a whole and in every detail.
Carmelo Samonà (The Custodian, 1983)
Man can see the things that surround him without demanding from them a usefulness.
It is only then that man sees and understands the form, the material and the color.
Imagination opens the door to miracles and here all the discoveries of the spirit - art, poetry, science - are gathered as sublime achievements.
Costantino Nivola
If only a work could be conceived that would allow us to escape the limited perspective of an individual self, not only to enter into other selves similar to our own, but to give voice to what has no words: the bird that lands on the gutter, the tree in spring and the tree in autumn, the stone, the cement, the plastic.
Italo Calvino (Six Memos for the Next Millennium - Multiplicity, 1985)
To the ugly word "still life," with which today we classify in painting the depiction of inanimate things, there corresponds, in another language, a much deeper and truer word, and much more gentle and filled with poetry:
"silent life".
Giorgio De Chirico
It is the world that surrenders to the probing gaze of the melancholic, as it does not before anyone else’s gaze.
The more inanimate things are, the more powerful and ingenious the mind that contemplates them can become.
(Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980)
To take a photograph means to participate in the mortality, vulnerability, and mutability of another person or another thing.
To take a photograph means to participate in the mortality, vulnerability, and mutability of another person or another thing.
To photograph is to confer importance.
(On Photography, 1973)
Susan Sontag
