Questa è una selezione di immagini tratte da un mio progetto in corso, “The observer – solitary prisoner”. Si tratta di una raccolta di fotografie scattate nel corso di un lungo periodo, che nel loro insieme vogliono sottolineare l’isolamento del fotografo (l’osservatore), ma allo stesso tempo quello di ciascuno di noi, chiuso nel proprio punto di vista personale (quello che Pater definisce “la stretta camera della mente individuale”).
L’esperienza riflessiva (e auto-riflessiva) è possibile anche grazie all’uso della fotocamera medioformato analogica, che permette lo scatto in situazioni estemporanee ma allo stesso tempo impone maggiore riflessione nella scelta dell’inquadratura.
Tutte le riproduzioni sono scansioni da pellicola bianco e nero 6×6.
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1873
Not just a camera 