Appunti
(Notes)
GruppoIseoImmagine
Casa Panella, via Duomo 39, Iseo
From 29 November to 26 December 2015
Giulio Obici’s life was guided by two great passions: journalism and photography. For more than forty years as editor and special envoy, Obici analysed terrorism – from the massacre at piazza Fontana to the murder of Moro; he followed important judicial events – from the Montesi case in 1957 to the Palermo mafia of the 80’s; but nevertheless, through his photography, was able to tell a story about the poetry hidden in the greyness of the streets and the beauty that makes up nature and the landscape.
Apart from his journalistic writings which were a way to investigate, rigorously and with the wish to tell the story and its impact on human life, Obici discovered at the same time the mystic value of photography, a different way to look at the city, its walls covered in anonymous writings, and visible analysis of the natural landscape, caught in the study of light.
The Brescian exhibition had more than a hundred black and white photographs, taken from the Obici archive. There were various themes – from city life to still life, including landscapes influenced by paintings. The photographer wanted to have a good look at reality and to bring out details which looked insignificant, in order to reveal unspoken secrets, to conjure up the poetry of a fleeting moment, bring back hidden memories and let the secret sense of reality re-emerge. In this way he created an semi-optic alphabet in which photography shows and retains images that may seem marginal – such as, for example, shadow on dirty walls or the small bricked-up window amongst other bricks – but they transform themselves into focal elements and a story, strengthened by the banal and the detail. So, Giulio Obici favours the constructive harmony of vision to harvest clues or signs of reality that become like a correspondence between facts and sentiments that go beyond the evidence and the appearance of the visible. Photography has become the footprint of the photographer who invites the spectator to look again at that same immortalised reality, to pay attention to a small detail, because any sign of reality is also a sign of its culture, such as the lines of poplars or the capacious cupola of a cathedral which, when turned over, can be transformed into fishing nets, suspended above the waters of the lagoon.
Order, measure and equilibrium in a human landscape, visible tales and games as an invitation to turn to reality, constructing and composing the many significant formats, because the way in which we register images is also the mental image which we all possess – this is what the photographer appears to say.
Giampietro Guiotto