Il flâneur detective
Tra fotografie e racconto i ricordi degli anni più belli
(The strolling detective. Photographs and memories of the best years)
Preface by Cesare De Michelis and Afterword by Tonci Foscari
Marsilio, Venice, 2015
Through the narrative of an autobiography, the book goes through the life and experiences of the author, taking in the connection between writing and photography – something which Obici has always kept strictly separate – understanding them to be instruments of the analysis of reality.
The title reflects the various sides of Obici which come together and enrich each other: the one of the precise journalist; the one of the analytical writer who reconstructs the suggestions of memory with a strict morality; the one of the photographer who is still amazed by the mechanics of photography. One of the very important elements in Obici’s life is Venice – and various chapters of the book are dedicated to it – he was born there and lived there for a while, a city which he loved because of the laguna, its light, its sights and its history. But other elements also come together in the book: the commitment of someone who for roughly ten years followed the tracks of terrorism, in which the subversive suggestions became monstrous crutches of the system; the pride he felt for his family which had started the daily Venetian newspaper (Il Gazzettino); the love for his parents who never bowed to fascist violence and who had always educated Giulio with a view to responsibility and rectitude. These pages show the profile of a man who lived with fervour and burning with passion, with a strong love for knowledge and study, enlightened and rational. A man who left a piercing reflexion on the second half of the twentieth century.
The title brings together the two sides of the personality of the author: the one who is obstinately determined in his search for the truth, as Giulio did in his work as a journalist, always ready to distrust whatever attempt at concealment; the other totally prepared to lose himself along the streets with a curiosity that was never satisfied and always without a certain destination, like a vagabond. Hence, on the one hand a totally analytical writer… on the other a photographer who literally steals with one click a moment that would otherwise be lost.
Cesare De Michelis
Every photograph that Giulio describes in his Flâneur Detective is a piece of intellectual autobiography. In Milan, the town where he lived, Giulio looks at things with the detachment of someone who feels that he belongs to a world with different values. It is through this detachment, one could almost say otherness, that a distinct sentiment winds through the various tales: the sometimes painful perception of “missing Venice”, the magical city in which his great-grandfather had founded and managed an important daily newspaper which his grandfather had inherited and for which mother, father and uncle, all of whom journalists as well, continued to write.
Tonci Foscari
Flâneur Detective is a book that should be read in one go, real memories interwoven by Giulio Obici, photographer and self taught writer, who died in 2011. With Venice, his birth place, in his heart, Obici lived through the twentieth century and his lifetime experience became part of his natural impatient storytelling. A two-sided narration that ran along parallel and spectacular lines and both starting from a common matrix: curiosity about the world and the necessity to represent it.
Words and images are part of Obici’s vocabulary since his childhood, when, being part of a family of journalists, writing for him became an impelling requirement and a special way to “get hold of life, with head and hands: to study it, to stop it in time and projecting it into the future”. From the beginning, when there was a mental block on his writing, images came to his rescue, opening the way to find in photography what he was looking for. The step from a writer’s block to the light re-emerging is brief and in Obici’s life the limits between his two biggest passions gradually diminish with the growing knowledge of their force. In the tales of the photographer, the pictures seem to take the place of words. The same narrative system emerges from the way the exhibition in the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice has been arranged. The exhibition has the same title as the book and shows a host of intense and punctual images, taken by Obici in the streets of the places he visited and it is like a writing, silent but eloquent and balanced. It is also, in the author’s mind, like a town amongst the most complex in the world, able to continue with static and miraculous rules and to provide an ever-changing story. If you live amongst a mosaic of reflexions, equilibrium is paramount.
However, it was the result of some unexpected reflexions that Obici rediscovered his love for photography. The useless locks on his children’s room that gave onto the Grand Canal, were closed over but there was a slit through which bits of the outside world were projected, upside down, onto the opposite wall. A child’s dark room, with a magic that overcame the war and hunger, the dread of the Nazis and the roundups of a family that was in the Resistance and orphan of a daily newspaper, Il Gazzettino, that was started by Obici’s great-grandfather in 1887 but taken over by the fascists in the Thirties.
Writing and light continued to shine in the hands of the photographer and writer, more and more so as he got older, a perfect joining together in the immediacy of a picture, this “click” that seals the identity of the photograph: “the only art form that is made in a single gesture, quick, inexorable, in time always the same but always new”. Or, continuing to run on parallel lines, giving Obici the reassurance of two valued instruments that he could use at any given time. And also Milan, his adopted city, lends itself to be shown in pictures, in light and immediacy, while writing becomes like a supporting and testifying actor of reality when Obici is taken up by the urgency of journalism, writing about the years of the Red Brigade or the many crowded court cases. With Obici words and photography become lexicon and syntax of a many-sided writing which possibly finds its best explanation in the famous words of Cartier-Bresson, aligning eye, heart and head.
Arianna Testino
Presentation at the Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice
Wednesday 9 March 2016 at 6 pm
Taking part Denis Curti, Renato Corsini and Cesare De Michelis