Milano Porta Nuova / Garibaldi
I've taken these a few days before Christmas. No I have no exact prediction for the incoming year nor I have any expectations just looking for what will come downstream. My predictive abilities never have been so low. Anyway I can certainly predict that I will take a closer look to this area. By the way here is an interesting round table that may shed some light on the, felt, lessening of our predictive powers. See you the next year.
I'm entering my traditional hibernation and vacation time. I'll be back in ten days. ... Well maybe a bit more .... Best wishes.
This summer I've started to shift my perceptual attention in landscape photography from the objects to the relation among them and the way in which we and the objects themselves define the space we move in, perceive and interpret, this is something I've been thinking and reading about for long time but which I could not relate to an immediate perception. Each of us, human, probably have a different way to define a space based on our cultural backgrounds and personal experiences. In this study, concluded with this post, I've tried to act as a person walking along a couple of streets picturing, as a photo tourist, what caught my eye. Generally I make some studies before getting to a place. In this case the concept is the "unplanned walk" in an "unplanned place" for a fixed amount of time (2 hours circa). The idea is that a photographer is some kind of specialist when it comes to visual relation that define space, a specialist by experience. Visual experience is made "viewing" and not "reading" just to stay on a very obvious plane. Well this may be in some contrast with the canonical view that wants the photographer as a mere recorder of an already established landscape made by an Architect (or even the Creator).
Right after what Norberto Bobbio called the "society of traffic lights", in Italy, it seems, we are having the season of roundabouts. We are certainly late with respect to the other developed European Countries but, as usual, we are making our best in terms of Mediterranean obsession. I'm not sure of the subtle philosophical implications but certainly it requires a totally different approach in negotiations among drivers. In visual terms roundabouts reshape the visual landscape in very powerful ways redistributing space and view points and, ultimately, for the postmodern urban reader, the centre of the roundabout is certainly an exemplary "no where land".
Conjugating documentation and subjective view has always been considered a contradiction. Never the less this is what we daily experience in our approach to the world. Each time we take a picture we are documenting something, taking a fragment of time and fixating it. Even in the most abstract picture we make, we are documenting. Is it necessary to voluntarily document something to make an image more a "document" than an other ? I'm not sure. Marc Auge in its "Anthropology of the present", an effort in the foundation of an anthropological analysis of our own culture, distinguishes among "intended" historical artefacts and non intended ones, or those who's purpose is not to be used in some future as a document of a conventional present. At the end of every picture what it remains is the human, or the robot, taking it, its point of view (or the one of the programmer), his visual choices and the process till the finished image.
I've been a while without publishing urban landscapes taken inside Milan. In the next posts I'm going to showcase a small study on spaces and visual relationships I've made in one of the oldest industrial areas of Milan with, hopefully, some thoughts.
For those of you interested in readings in postmodern condition "narrative" an interesting list has been published a few days ago by aphotostudent blog. It contains references worth to be considered for an historical perspective on modernism and postmodernism. As clearly put in the paper from Habermas, in the list, the problem is that (post)modernism is a moving target, something that clearly depends on the point in time/space where the question about what is to be considered modern is raised. I have to confess that some recent developments in sustainable technologies are hard to not be considered modern, the word, however, became, so to say, unspeakable.
Tovo S.Agata Valtellina Sondrio
A photograph preserves a moment of time and prevents it being effaced by the supersession of further moments. In this respect photographs may be compared to images stored in memory. Yet there is a fundamental difference: whereas remembered images are the residue of a continous experience, a photograph isolates the appearances of a disconnected instant.
From "Another way of telling" by John Berger
Fondovalle is one of my oldest themes. I could say that its the Theme since my first photo. Taking pictures of these places helps me to stay in touch with em even if my position is now more that of an informed tourist instead of that of an insider as in my youth. This, for me, is one of the difficulties of the theme. Some times the weight of the memories gets in making things less clear. So I'm constantly suspended between the emotional plane given by the memories and the pictorial one where I simply try to make an honest description of the place.
Maybe it is only a SAD effect, but Autumn is certainly the bloggers' preferred season for embroidering upon what is to be considered art or not. Just to put my two cents (European of course) in let me cite a passage from Polidoro da Caravaggio where he describes a discussion between Agostino Carracci, one of founders of the famous Bolognese school of painting, and a group of Art connoisseur of the time. They were speaking about the recently discovered statue group of the Laocoonte, but Agostino was taking himself apart, asked why he said, designing the group with great precision, that "Painters must express themselves with their hands". Now if you agree with me Photography is made with tools that are a modern extension of our hands: the camera and the computer.
Since when I've started again to take pictures, three years ago after a stop of seven, my approach changed sensibly, and it is still changing fast. I'm not sure if it is only an effect of speed at which today we are moving ideas in and out of the Internet, after all seven years ago the Net was there, and I was there since day one.
In a recent post in his blog Joerg Colberg, stripped out the essence of an article appeared in "the Village Voice" and titled "Contemporary Art Photographers Mess With the Medium". Joerg's quote is worth considering for itself. 
Baselica Bologna Pavia, Parco Agricolo Sud Milano
If you can see, look.
If you can look, observe.
If you can observe, compare.
Just rotated the tripod head by 180 degrees with respect to the previous posted picture. Here you have a full view of almost everything that made this valley, Valtellina, famous. With the notable exclusion of the highest suicide rate in Europe and the cancer rate that is among the highest in Italy. For a brief explanation of the light conditions see here.
Forcola Berbenno Sondrio Valtellina Italy
