It would seem fairly obvious, and only proper (in fact it is), to open a piece, however short and occasional, on photography and not cite Sontag (On photography), Barthes (La Chambre clair), and why not, going back, reach the trailblazer, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (though let it be clear that the citations and the debts could go on far longer still). To decide against it, and then set about talking of photography. Something between presumption and foolishness. Which may, who knows, be a good place to be? This preamble serves the sole purpose of making clear what will not be found here: erudite essays (inhibited by incompetence), a long and tortuous introduction (forbidden out of modesty).
The truth, banal if you like, is that for some time we had wanted to offer our readers (the privileged few!) a piece on photography. It could have been entrusted to an expert, of whom there are cartloads, be it an aesthetician or an art critic. But then, since we know so many photographers, and many are good friends who do fine work, we thought we would keep it simple. We chose four of them; they work in different fields and, as the saying goes (a touch crudely, perhaps), they don’t put on airs. That is not the least of the reasons we invited them to introduce themselves.
What follows is a selection, regrettably a narrow one, of their work. Happy viewing. (gp)

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Andrea Adriani (fashion photographer)

It was the summer I turned nine. One Sunday morning, still half asleep, as I stepped out of the little bedroom I shared with my brother in a big apartment block on the outskirts of Perugia, I closed the door behind me and found myself in the dark corridor, where I saw the woman on the third floor of the building across from ours hanging out her washing; but, to my enormous astonishment, the scene was projected in miniature, upside down, on the black wall in front of me! It was like watching television in reverse, and in HD no less (this was 1981). I don’t know how long I stood there transfixed, watching upside down the scenes of everyday life, windows opening, people chatting on their balconies, all perfectly ordinary but for the fact that I was shut inside a dark room… then, slowly, it all faded; I was in shock, convinced I had seen aliens, aliens I knew perfectly well, though, because they were my neighbours!
I tried to tell someone, my mother for instance, but…
Who knows how many more times I found myself in the dark of that Magic corridor… but never anything again!
Only some years later did I discover what a pinhole image was, and I realised that on that morning a perfect, unrepeatable light had projected those incredible images through the window into the long, narrow bathroom, which in those moments became a giant camera obscura, right down to the (pinhole) keyhole before my rapt and bewildered face.
Ever since, every single day I do or think something to do with photography, because in the end it was photography that chose me… not the other way around. (Andrea Adriani)

Andrea Adriani, 47, a photographer-craftsman from Perugia. Since 2001 his photographs have appeared in some 450 fashion magazines the world over. Having become a globetrotter of the catwalks, he is the magic eye into which the ethereal top models gaze as they emerge at the far end of the runways of New York, London, Paris and Milan. “I work with Imaxtree, one of the biggest agencies in the world, and there are 21 of us: 11 shooting and 10 working the pictures on the computer. An assembly line that supplies coverage to 90 per cent of the fashion magazines, which is why we have to cover everything: the backstage, the people in the street, those in the hall, the details of faces and accessories. At the moment, at the New York and London shows I do the ‘full lens’, repetitive work but demanding great precision, because all the shots have to be identical: the same space above and below, the right foot forward touching the ground and the left just lifting off behind. Only colour, focus and stride count. Light is decisive, and everything is fine when it comes from the fixed tungsten lamps, the same for every model. The trouble starts when the hall is completely black, dark, and the ‘entrances’ are lit by the ‘follow spot’, beams of light fired from three or four positions that often overlap and are out of sync with one another. You have to keep stopping down the aperture, changing exposure and focus; every model who comes out is a different situation. In short, whereas for an ordinary show you take five shots per model and use two, here you have to at least double that. In Milan and Paris, on the other hand, I handle the ‘beauty’, that is the close-ups, faces and accessories.”

The photograph I’m especially fond of? The one I took at UJ 2006 of James Brown and Solomon Burke, looking straight into the camera and smiling. James Brown would die a few months later; that shot has stayed in my heart.

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Francesco Capponi (artist)

THE ILLUSION OF LIGHT

In pursuit of a shadow of light, of figures and places on the margins, in a world that rushes by, that races along with its aperture wide open over everything and everyone. In the age of visibility, of images within arm’s reach, something or someone gets lost, perhaps the very possibility of telling a story. Perhaps… In the question, in the doubt, in a pause along the headlong run of time, one comes upon and discovers the work of Francesco Capponi: an artist forever caught up in the magic of beginnings, an explorer of the game of creation, a keeper of small hidden treasures. Let us imagine Capponi coming down the stairs of an attic, closing a little creaking door behind him, drawing slowly near and pulling from his bag small, mysterious objects. A delicate movement of the fingers lifts the lid of tiny boxes and, bidding us make no noise, he shows us, at the bottom of the brown tin container, strange sleeping creatures. They dwell in, and feed upon, the single ray of light that enters through a minuscule hole in the lid.

Magic of life in a box. Francesco Capponi, like the last of the storytellers, of the alchemists, of the troubadours, opens for us the door of his world, a world that lives in the space of a single hole. The objects are the measure of memory; they accompany and trace out a path of perception, they speak and let us imagine a life once lived. Sometimes they are left behind, abandoned, but someone else may find them, reuse them, transform them… To enclose within them a life, or an image of one. You have to lift the lid and look inside, spend time there giving voice to the characters who inhabit the bottom. Clowns, jugglers, stilt-walkers, men, women, tightrope artists, beards, eyes, breasts, legs: each box a trace of a story. Stumbling into the hole of one of Francesco Capponi’s boxes, all these strange characters have found a place to live, crumbling away the borders of time, because in “our” time, the time of the wide-open aperture, these characters cannot be seen; they are there but they blur, they are lost in too much light.

Capponi finds them at the corners of life, at the crossroads of the noises of the margins, and he strikes a pact with them, making them dwell in a small portable object, in a photographic box that will travel the world, that will belong to places and hands and, once opened, will live on in the tale told by an eye. Old lidded containers, in Capponi’s hands, become photographic instruments and supports. Inside them, images slowly held captive. Such a longing to enter Capponi’s attic of treasures, such a longing to breach that secret place on the margins and discover a world of images that bursts from the imagination of a child who has learned never to stop playing at the discovery of life. Once the little door of the room of creations has been opened, one cannot cease wanting to return, to leap into a world of boxed characters, to touch them, tend to them, listen to their breathing, and then out again to feel the shift of a time that flows differently, to feel the speed of the noise, and then back inside to wrap oneself in the slow light that makes the images. To wish to shut oneself away and sleep at the bottom of boxes and become a living object, hidden in some corner of the world, passing from hand to hand, from attic to attic, from margin to margin,… To slip into a bag and travel on to the next encounter to be inhabited. Capponi is the wizard of simple magic: a box, a hole and a beam of light, and the infinity of the world’s possibilities opens as far as the eye can see within a narrow border of tin.” Valentina Gregori

Francesco Capponi was born in Perugia, where he still lives today. He studied sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and from his years of training onwards he has worked through the cross-pollination of various artistic languages, among which photography holds great importance, above all the analogue and experimental kind. Light is his main field of research: Francesco investigates photography in its original meaning of “drawing with light”, and starting from this premise he seeks out and experiments with new interpretations of the technique, trying to keep the dialogue between the ancient and the contemporary alive and constant. This photographic experimentation also draws strongly on the three-dimensionality characteristic of sculpture, which allows him to transform or use the most varied objects as cameras and to build, single-handedly, his own optical apparatuses such as pinhole cameras, camerae obscurae or magic lanterns. He has taken part in numerous exhibitions, among them “Generation what?” at the MAXXI museum in Rome, “Create” at the Caos in Terni, “Orientarsi con le stelle” curated by Luca Beatrice at Palazzo della Penna in Perugia, “Dedalo” in Perugia and Tubingen, “Slow Photo Project” in Bologna, and “turno 14/22” in Milan. Permanent sculptures of his are on display in Terni (BCT) and at Palazzo Bourbon in Monte Santa Maria in Tiberina. His works, especially the photographic ones, feature in both Italian and international publications, as for example “Experimental Photography” published by Thames & Hudson (2015).

www.francescocapponi.com

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Marco Giugliarelli (reporter)

By just ten days I was born in the nineteen-sixties, and perhaps that has always shaped my restless indolence. I then grew up with a curious and shy disposition, and these traits drew me to photography as a discreet way of observing whatever interests me.

After various experiences in the world of photography, in 1996 I began working with the daily paper Il Messaggero; this job gave me what I was looking for, a front-row seat from which to witness the life of the world around me. Crime, hard news and society gossip became my daily bread and allowed me to forge ties with situations and people I would otherwise never have reached.

In 1999 I attended a workshop with Paolo Pellegrin, who was about to join Magnum, and I realised that my photography was unripe, too literal, distant. I understood that what interests me is to recount through images what lies inside and behind things, and that to tell them as I wish I must immerse myself in whatever it is I want to capture.

In 2003 I was called on to take part in a many-handed photographic account of Italian scouting, which took shape in the book “Passaggi”, published by ERI RAI. During the book’s launch at the Antoniano in Bologna I met and shook hands with Topo Gigio, and I realised I would never reach such heights again. I work as a photojournalist with agencies, newspapers and other publications; I teach what I know of photography to adults and children, learning much from my pupils; I tell in pictures the story of festivals up and down Italy.

After the 2016 earthquake I was called on by a Milanese agency to document the aftermath of the quake in Umbria. My accounts were gathered in an instant book, “Samuel a un anno e una casa”, which takes its title from the baby born on the night of the first tremors who, together with his family, was among the first to be assigned a “housing unit” in Norcia.
At the end of 2018 came “Luce Ligth”, a book that portrays places of Umbrian culture as I saw and photographed them under unusual conditions of light.
After 23 years on the job, I am beginning to be regarded as an old hand at the trade. This condition, on top of the pain in my knees and back from the constant load of gear I lug around, means I get called here and there to recount my professional experience. This past year I found myself with Alex Majoli, former president of the Magnum agency, at the MAR in Ravenna, speaking on a panel about the changes in my profession, and giving a seminar on my work as a photojournalist at the Politecnico di Milano.

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Pio Scoppola (stage photographer)

Pio Scoppola was born in Rome in 1959. He began photographing in the early nineteen-seventies and, from the mid-eighties on, has worked as a professional photographer in the field of cinema, theatre and events of various kinds. Alongside a solid technical training, his passion for music became the central pivot of his professional path. This deep interest led him naturally to music photography as an expression of both art and life. Over the course of his career he has worked with national and specialist magazines and has been among the official photographers of major Italian music festivals on the jazz, rock and pop scene. He has collaborated with various Italian and international artists, both on tour and in the studio. He currently lives and works in the Tuscia. Below are some of his works.