A grotesque landscape

Watching, observing, enchanted, even in front of seemingly banal scenes. There is always a key to understanding every photographic composition, ready to stimulate the intellect of those who use photography as a form of thought, like this grotesque landscape captured in the evening, about ten years ago while passing through a crossroads on a provincial road.

I stopped to contemplate this image as a whole, as if I were trying to decipher an ancient hieroglyph or, better, a billboard written in a foreign language.
Although I found it trivial in its flatness and with the light that was degrading, while I was looking for the "right" angle to take the shot, "she", the image, began to talk to me about events that had happened and others that still should have to verify.

The compositional whole, thanks to the presence of multiple triangular "arrow" shapes, seemed to indicate the four cardinal points of the road signs taken from the back, the road block in the lower part of the shot, the peak of Monviso in the background, and the tapered nose of the Fiat G91 fighter-bomber. Precisely that aircraft known for having been used by NATO in counter-insurgency operations in Portuguese Guinea and in Mozambique, and for having been the aircraft of the Frecce Tricolori national acrobatic team for a long time.

The Land Rover Defender of the Carabinieri, which can be seen in the center stacked next to a Fiat Campagnola, reminded me of the tragedy of when I participated as a cameraman at the G8 in Genoa in 2001, a repressed memory. Then there are disused excavators and earthmoving machinery: all symbolic elements to stigmatize "Progress", piled up in the fence of a demolisher, ready to be crumpled by a menacing press in the shape of a dinosaur, which will break down its violence to recover its raw material, the precious and increasingly scarce raw material. Current aridity due to too much greed. North, south, east, west, up, down, right, left. A complete picture.

Looking at the horizon, I see that snow that is no longer there in the Po Valley, fugitive for too long like rain, and so I ask myself, now, in the light of what is happening: what are the benefits of progress if in the end man has never changed?

Luca Periotto
NP May 2023