The dreamer

Among the people portrayed in the course of my career is Kleber, a young Brazilian met in his tiny accommodation in one of the many cortiço veiled by the shadow of the skyscrapers of any vast Brazilian metropolis .
By cortiço is meant a collective dwelling, made up of modest accommodation that is anything but cheap, characteristic for the common use of internal public spaces, including toilets.

At a certain point Kleber assumed the pose of a dreamer, a daydreamer who, while recounting his human story, seemed to find all the answers by observing a very specific point of that ceiling painted in purple red. The dreamer dreams and the dreamer inside the dream dreams.
At the same time as him I began to dream too. When I raised my head I had the sensation that that ceiling had expanded to such an extent that the image of Red Ceiling emerged, until it became visible, that is the photograph that William Eggleston shot in Greenwood Mississippi in 1973. A naked light bulb hanging from a crimson ceiling, three white cables snaking across the shiny surface like arteries.
A banal image, perhaps, but one that carries within itself an indefinable sense of threat.

So here's the meaning of my dream: being able to photograph what lies below and completes that famous shot. It is the limit horizon of a photograph, external to the photographic square.


© Luca Periotto 2022
NP February 2022