Giulio Obici: Antologica
(Giulio Obici: Anthology)
Wavephotogallery
Via Trieste 32, Brescia
From 9 to 27 November 2013
Giulio Obici’s life was guided by two great passions: journalism and photography. For more than forty years, as editor and special correspondent, Obici followed terrorism, from the tragedy of piazza Fontana to the Moro crime, he covered important judicial events, from the Montesi court case of 1957 to the mafia cases in Palermo in the 80’s. But with his photographic images he managed to uncover the poetry that is hidden in the darkness of the street and beauty in the form of nature and landscapes.
His journalistic writings were deeply searching, strictly done and wanting to tell a real and human story. Over time Obici discovers the epistemological value of photography which becomes like another way of looking at a town, with lots of anonymous writings on walls, publicity, and visible analysis of shapes spread about the natural landscape and as part of a constructive equilibrium and the study of light.
The anthological exhibition in Brescia which contained more than a hundred black and white photographs were chosen from the Obici archives, with highlights from amongst the various themes – from the metropolitan journal to still lives, up to landscapes inspired by paintings –, it shows the wish of the photographer to properly analyse reality and to point out what look like insignificant details in order to reveal secrecy, to evoke the beauty of a fleeting moment, show hidden memories and bring up the secret sense of reality. He thus created his own almost optical language, in which photography registers and keeps traces that might look unimportant – such as, for example, the shadow on encrusted walls or a small bricked-up window amongst other bricks –, which become focal elements and reminders of a narrative, shocked by the upsetting force of the banal and its detail. In other words, Giulio Obici favors the constructive harmony of vision to collect the clues, namely that sign of reality which results in a multitude of facts and sentiments which go over and above the evidence of visual appearance. Photography seems to have become the footprint of the photographer, which invites the onlooker to linger when looking at this immortalised reality, to pay attention to small details because every sign of reality is also a description of a certain 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 the equilibrium of a humanised landscape, narrations and visual games invite one to turn to reality to construct and compose the many formal meanings which we might be able to imagine, because that is how our imagination works.
Giampietro Guiotto