the instant of seeing

BUFFI MISTERI

These are 24 fragments of life that, detached from their original context, try to displace the observer offering many funny little mysteries on which to dwell.

I put together this collection with the aim of publishing a book.

It came out a much more intimate and personal work than I could imagine at first, full of citations and small tributes to musicians, poets, writers, photographers and artists who have had a profound influence on who I am as an individual.

This work owes much to Jessica Backhaus for helping me to understand the poetry of color and the importance of a sequence.

This work owes also a lot to Gus Powell for showing me that street photography can be poetic, and for having shown how to try to pursue my personal photographic aesthetic.

January '17

Fabio Secchia

BUFFI MISTERI, OR THE NOT DEFINITIVE MEANING OF THE EXISTENT

Some women with their folk clothes look towards the horizon and the surrounding valley from the hillside; caption tells us that those Kashmir women are praying, facing the sun rising behind the Himalayas. It takes a little attention, and a look slower than the one we usually look upon pictures nowadays, in order to discover that the taller woman’s palms up to the sky seem to support the clouds.

This Cartier – Bresson’s photograph came back to me when I looked with due attention at Fabio Secchia’s Delocalisation: the wide platter that the street vendor bears on his head seems to hold up the industrial plant in the background.

Perhaps this is not the photograph’s punctum, but from this I would like to start, because it seems to lead a central role in the work. The title, Delocalisation, must be understood in a descriptive, non metaphorical sense? A beach with Caribbean sands, a man with an olive flesh skin: it would seem to be on an exotic atoll, if it were not for such a wide background... Would this photograph only represent the increasingly frequent movement of production processes in other countries? Unlikely. It can not be. The title, like many others in the work, seems to be allusive, connotative. Is delocalisation ours? Have we been relocated from Milan to Maldives? Looking at the picture, it seems to be elsewhere.

We started with many questions and few certainties, but after all this work, in the words of the author, consists of twenty – four fragments of life that, detached from their original context, try to displace the observer, offering many small and funny mysteries on which to dwell. These are the particular coincidences that are created in our daily life, twenty – four true to life photographs, to put it to well known Italian photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin words, each of which contains at least one question mark, with regards to the author's point of view, the reasons for the presence of the subject, the incongruity of certain scenes.

For this specific reason that attention we talked about before is necessary to look into all the photographs: they require attention from the viewer for author’s choice, they are often deep, it is not about photographs that are burned with a glance. Although they belong to the street photography genre, in fact, Fabio Secchia decided to overcome and expunge those photographs whose mimic was more easily recognisable (for instance those that exploit the mechanism of analogy, of juxtaposition: one of the most persistent in my memory portrays a little boy wearing an angry bird t – shirt as he passes by a birds’ billboard).

Fabio Secchia required himself a major effort and the same effort he requires from the observer, photographs require some observation time to discover so many details that fell into place in the magic instant when the shutter has opened and then closed again. But the observer is rewarded with the richness of images, the richness of form and meaning, of meanings that are possible.

Although work’s title, Misteri buffi, is certainly Lombard in a cultural sense (in fact it reminds to the best known chef-d'œuvre of 1997 Nobel price winner Dario Fo), the development is not regional at all: these photographs, in fact, represent us in a subtle and sometimes malicious way, they reflect our society starting from a city , Milan, which is a faithful reflection of the country: the omnipresence of smartphones, which have now become a fixation, sustainable mobility, our solitudes and daily fears, the sensuality that is increasingly exposed for commercial purposes... It is quite curious that from the verb the author used to explain that these photographs displace the viewer, derive a noun, displacement, which can mean the situation in which a person is forced to leave their own country and go somewhere else to live: in this way, then, it could also be the delocalisation of the street vendor...

The number of pictures, twenty – four, is highly symbolic of the analog past of the medium: as we all remember, in fact, many were the takes of a film roll. In that analogical past Fabio Secchia started his voyage with photography, but it’s hard to believe, given the high quality of achievements, that the adventure with color photography is so recent. I had the pleasure to follow this work since its inception, in those long talks with Fabio, while he was carrying his bike by hand through the streets of his Milan, and I remember that from the very beginning he was definitely convinced of some technical and expressive choices, from the first photographs taken in color, some of which merged into this work. Most of all he has always loved deep blacks, in some places even illegible. Rejected the comparison with Alex Webb’s pictures, I suggest here the hypothesis that it’s an echo of Caravaggesque techniques, Caravaggio – another great passion of Fabio – that started from a dark preparation for the paintings, with lands of different kinds, to paint then only the parts in light, the lights and the half tones.

La città tutta per lui, one of the photographs, refers to a short novel by Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo: or the seasons in the city. I would like to close with a quote from Calvino, taken from the lecture on Exactitude in Six memos for the next millennium: "The universe may be dissolving in a cloud of heat, may be sinking down the vortex of entropy, but inside this irreversible process there is the possibility of areas of order, portions of an existent straining to achieve a form, and privileged points from which it seems that one can glimpse a design, a perspective. A work of literature is one of these minimal portions in which the existent crystallises into a form, acquires a meaning, not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive as an organism. Poetry is the great enemy of chance, in spite of also being a daughter of chance and knowing that, in the last resort, chance will win the battle".

It seems to me that photography, and these of Fabio in particular, are just that.

October '17

Giuseppe Motti

Inspirations and tributes

"Il chiodo in testa" - Gianni Celati 1974

"Anime Salve" - Fabrizio De André 1996

"A love supreme" - John Coltrane 1964

"Punto G" - Giorgio Gaber 1970

"Giunge a volte repente" - Eugenio Montale 1925

"La città tutta per lui" - Italo Calvino 1963

"Passalento" - Ivano Fossati 1990

"L'attimo fuggente" - Tom Schulman 1989

"La follia del mirino" - Italo Calvino 1955