Alessandro Vicario. The Time of the Camera

Translator’s note: the Italian word camera can mean both “room” and “camera”. The title and the essay explore this double meaning.

Presented here—after an image of the textured glass of a door, which introduces the meditative dimension of the work—are three sequences of photographic images: a polyptych, a diptych and a triptych. As the title indicates, they concern time and a camera, entities connected by a relationship of belonging (“of the”). In fact, there are not one but two “cameras”: first, a room in the house—now completely transformed—where Alessandro Vicario spent periods with a loved one that hold great significance in his experience and memory of life; second, the photographic camera, which carries equal weight in that experience and memory, and occupies so much of his present.

The two “cameras”, then, are linked not only etymologically but, for the artist, emotionally and theoretically as well: both are true machines for remembering, enclosing the “that-has-been” which, in contrast to the dominant culture, he has no wish to suppress but seeks instead to preserve. Although both cameras are immersed in time, which destroys everything, they appropriate that very time, mitigating its inevitable destructive action through the utopian duration of artistic form.

But how does the form of these photographic sequences “save” time? In two ways, corresponding to the dual nature of the camera itself. On the one hand, as reproductions of things, the images arrest—carry from the transient into the permanent—the light that enters the room from outside or is produced within it, revealing the volumes, surfaces and textures of objects laden with memory; on the other, as arrangements of lighter and darker patches, the images arrest (and display) the process by which they were formed inside the photographic camera through the action of light which, entering it, activated the physical and chemical memory of the exposed surface.

There is another aspect of form, more external but no less meaningful: the sequential structure of the images, grouped into a polyptych, a diptych and a triptych. This too arrests and displays time: that of the room depicted, that of the camera depicting it, and that of the viewer who, in looking, pictures and considers them both within their own time of reading, whether relatively slow and unhurried or fast and rushed. Such a reading cannot be untouched—if only as an unconscious residue of culture—by the memory of old panelled altarpieces, of the compartmentalised picture boards used by storytellers, and, finally, of the photographic sequences of Narrative Art.

The “time of the camera”, then, in all its meanings, refers to the fundamental dimensions of the sacred and of narrative, so often intertwined in the history of our culture. Here the artist relives them as a secular yet emotionally intense experience in his relationship with a person, a place and an artistic technique.

All this is contained in the depth of images that appear commonplace and familiar: a curtain onto which the gaps between the slats of the shutters project rippling bands of light that, with the apparent movement of the sun, change position and length from one frame to the next; two headboards and two lit bedside lamps, which might seem to belong to the same image repeated in mirror reversal, were it not for prolonged observation revealing them to be similar yet different objects; three sections of wall traversed by cracks, evident signs of the time that threatens the house and the memories enclosed within it.

Yet the banality of everyday objects, precisely because it becomes the subject of a narrative and is held at a distance that is the secularised form of the sacred, is redeemed through a process of estrangement and rediscovery. Thus those who view these images in this exhibition room also experience the time of the camera.

Alessandro Vicario, Dittico I e II, 1999, black-and-white photographic prints.