The study of Giulio Obici at Muslone di Gargnano.
The archive of Giulio Obici consists of roughly 13,500 photographs, taken between 1970 and 2010 (those from before that time were destroyed during one of the high water disasters in his Venetian studio). They have been re-arranged and catalogued during 2014 by the art historian Olivia Corsini with the help of Obici’s partner, Marcella Andreoli, and his journalist friend Pippo Iannaci. It was hard work. It meant organizing and making choices, including out of rather fragmented material. Obici made sure to make notes on all his negatives, dates and technical characteristics, development and printing and the photographs were arranged in chronological order, but not according to subject. What Olivia Corsini brought together was an important work, a catalogue that pointed to the work of Obici and the main methods of his research and the elements that constituted its poetry.
Olivia Corsini says in the introduction to the catalogue (Edizioni Zoom, 2014): “Two great diaries had been created: a private diary, and intimate, as opposed to a public diary, always discrete but perhaps more conceptual and easier to catalogue. Whereas the other one, the public diary, is the nucleus of what Obici diligently indicated between trial prints and the final choice for being catalogued. The exclusion of the first would have lacked a description of Giulio as a human-photographer, and the eye with which the photographer perceives the everyday, and which is fundamental when it comes to creating a catalogue which is complete in every respect”.
The dark room of Giulio Obici at Muslone di Gargnano.
These two fundamental categories come to the fore in other sections to bring out the various themes that were dear to the photographer. So the public diary is divided into four sections: Metropolitan Tales, Emptiness in politics, Proclamation and Walls. However, the private ones are: Visions, Angles, Still lives and Sprites. “The first diary collects moments of everyday city life, in which the optics of ironic juxtaposition of urban furniture redesigns the imagination and in which the writings on the walls become a diary of stereotyped love and unsatisfactory politics. Moreover it is a response to the desire of the photographer to turn his camera at right angles to the wall, at least once in every roll. But also a city in which to metaphorically objectify the emptiness of politics in the unused electoral billboards, which have become rusty and marked. On the other hand the private diary is made up of more intimate tales which unearth traces of life, even though there is no life. Objects become human and appearances become goblins of a world rediscovered from childhood which frame nature as though it were an unreal vision. In reverse, still lives are glimpsed in artificial objects and the pictures are seen as though through deformed or evanescent perspectives”.
“If the different categories might mean that the narrative of the photographer might be branching off – says Olivia Corsini – it is however important not to think of them as stagnant compartments. It would be a mistake not to consider all the other photographs as fragments of a bigger picture which really is the poetry of the photographer. A poetry which serves as the common denominator of every photograph and which sums up the concept of epiphany, a small revelation which removes the veil from the everyday that forms our vision and allows us to see what is around us, as though it is the first time”.
From 2018 the management of Giulio Obici’s archive was given to Craf – Centro di ricerca e archiviazione della fotografia (Centre for research and archive of photography) at Spilimbergo, which, for more than twenty years studies and researches the photographic heritage of the north-east of Italy in particular, also of Italian photography, by organizing exhibitions and conferences, but more than anything the conservation and making the most of the important photographic riches such as those from the photographers Luigi Crocenzi, Carlo Leidi and Toni Nicolini, and from the Gruppo Friuliano per una Nuova Fotografia.
