Palomar

Scrutinising in minute detail the things that happen before our eyes in everyday life, scrutinising them with an obsessive scrupulousness of precision, as if our gaze – isolating itself from all the rest of the context – once selected the subject of interest approached it through the lens of the objective. The experience consists in dwelling each time on one isolated phenomenon at a time: without this preliminary focus, no form of knowledge would be possible. The closer you get, the more the subject multiplies within it as if infinity were contained in every point. Remaining silent but alert! To trace the thread of the discourse that flows there, where the words are silent, straining one’s ear to the silence of infinite spaces or to the whistle of birds, trying to decipher the alphabet of sea waves or of the grass of a meadow. Periodically I can’t help but reread Italo Calvino. In particular, rereading Palomar develops in me the authentic sense of investigation.
What is it about? Italo Calvino was a narrator of the literary invisible like Borges, Gianni Celati and – I think not least – Peter Handke. The lesson I learned from their readings made me understand how every aspect of manifest reality can be explained with clarity and lightness. Since they are visual writers, that is, capable of stimulating the reader’s imagination with their writing, they create and suggest to the photographer, the painter or the director, the right way to approach reality. When I feel particularly light and inclined, I select from reality my models to photograph: they can be portraits caught in street life or, as in the case of the series I decided to call Two Stone Birds Suddenly Taking Flight, taken one day while I was crossing the outskirts of Soweto in South Africa. On that occasion, I began to build a story based on three shots taken in perhaps less than a minute, all filmed in motion from the car window. In practice I tried to apply to photography what I learned to do with the camera in other circumstances, selecting three different moments that were nevertheless able to articulate together: this concept in photography is called sequence, but I prefer to call it story. Naturally it is the suggestion that I felt instantly, when I saw a pair of fake, ornamental birds, appearing between the hedges of a house: an image that I then casually associated with a pair of real birds that I caught in the act of flying over a surprised man walking on a sidewalk in the same block.


Luca Periotto
NP February 2025