Traces and Visions

Uno scatto dopo by Luigi Erba and Paesaggi d’assenza by Alessandro Vicario.

In keeping with the discussion on pages 6 and 7 of this magazine, on photography as trace and interpretation, we draw attention to two concise volumes by artists who differ greatly in age and style: Luigi Erba, born in 1949, an established photographer and scholar of photographic language, and Alessandro Vicario, born in 1968, a photographer committed to an analytical reading of the world. Luigi Erba manipulates film, presenting two black-and-white works—Interfotogrammi (1987–1993) and Un luogo sull’altro (1996–2004)—in which frames seem to slide over one another, creating physical connections through superimposition or mental ones through juxtaposition. This is a vision far removed from descriptiveness, if not openly opposed to “the aseptic photography/topography of the territory and the analytical image”, as the biographical notes in the catalogue openly state. Alberto Veca’s text strongly emphasises this clear choice in favour of a more lyrical and individual reading.

And if memory occupies a considerable part of Erba’s work, especially in the conceptual sense of layering images through an interplay of recollection and chance, memory is also the backbone of the different—this time analytical—process that shapes many of Alessandro Vicario’s works. Sulle tracce di Lalla Romano is the subtitle of the other volume, Paesaggi d’assenza, which Vicario published in collaboration with Antonio Ria on the occasion of an exhibition of his photographs of the writer Lalla Romano’s home. It is precisely traces, imprints, that Vicario pursued in an original 10 × 12 cm format, to obtain more detailed images, and in colour, for greater fidelity to “reality”. Portions of bookcases, drawers, walls, furnishings, windows, display cases, old photographs and postcards reassemble the surroundings and atmosphere in which the great Italian writer lived for so many years: memory triumphs through the description of details of the house. In this light, the analytical approach becomes irreplaceable, even in its fragmentary form: Roberto Signorini, author of one of the catalogue texts, stresses that the total space of the house is excluded from representation, emphasising absence and focusing attention on these countless, varied traces. “The utmost concreteness and proximity with the utmost intangibility and distance,” writes Vicario, summing up his work.

Two artists, two very different, even opposing languages: that is photography, folks.