Serene and still it all seems, frozen by a slice of time. Empty, desolate in time, in fantasy. In reality always changing, always moving, never still.
Doctor: I fall on you and I see all these things… The roots, the shrubs… Have you ever thought that plants might feel, that they are conscious, that they understand even… The trees, hazel…
Marushka: This is an alder.
Doctor: No importance. They are there, they are not rushing anywhere. It is us who are running, hurrying talking banalities. Because the nature that is in us, we don’t want to rely on it.
(Dialogue from a movie “Mirror”, 1975 by A.Tarkovsky)
I drive America every summer. Its emptiness is the perfect respite from the hyper social day-to-day of Europe. A rest stop is the opposite of a café. A freeway is the inverse of a high street. Old junkers, exit ramps, endless skies and Evangelical extremism. Skinny dipping in a Kansas creek, Polaroids, parking lots, singalongs to brassy boozy bands on the switchback backroads of the California badlands.
But the temples are the dead malls. They are the the Meccas, the massive monoliths, sun-baked carcasses on the contracting edges of once-swollen cities. Surrounded by endless square miles of painted, partitioned pavement. Victor Gruen’s bastard babies, once auspicious and buzzing, driven to death by greed and genericness.
They are the casualties of the old, myopic capitalism. They are stunningly, painfully beautiful. Alarmingly quiet. Festooned with the rusting logotypes and label scars of once-proud companies. Burdine’s. Bullock’s. Montgomery Ward. Dead innovators. Passed away populists. The height of midcentury modern, now mired in miasma.
‘Cause on the surface the city lights shine
They’re calling at me, come and find your kind
Sometimes I wonder if the World’s so small
That we can never get away from the sprawl
Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there’s no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights
- Arcade Fire, Sprawl, 2011
It amazes me why and how places that are abandoned, deserted or just not maintained slowly fade and become beautiful. They might seem sad, but somehow light caresses them in a special way. It’s a quality you can not fake, it is time that shapes them. These places are all around the world, in every city, town and village, slowly disintegrating. And somehow it’s comforting to know for sure that time exists, that time changes, that nothing stays the same.
Roll your lowrider down Oñate, ese.
Roll your blunt down Riverside, bro.
Spark it with a vacha, ese.
Then up at 6 to haul leño.
Red or green
in black and white.
Fiestas y luego a bonfire by night.
Jail and bizcochitos and a single-wide home.
Overdose.
Then comatose.
Adobe and Om (ओं).
The 8th edition of Fotografia Europea, the yearly international event devoted to photography, is about to start; the countdown has reached its end and Reggio Emilia is ready to welcome Italian and foreign visitors for the long opening weekend from 3rd to 6th of May 2013. As each year, the festival hosts numerous qualified workshops and encounters with artists and professionals in the field, who will be asked to talk about the main theme: To Change. Photography and Responsibility, divided in four sub-issues: surprise, faith, estrangement, vision.
Among the people invited to exchange their point of views we count the writers Tiziano Scarpa and Dževad Karahasan, the biologist Yael Lubin and the artist Tomàs Saraceno. With a multidirectional approach, Fotografia Europea presents a wide range of photo exhibitions scattered around the beautiful, historical, and sometimes unknown, locations offered by the city. Palazzo Magnani proposes the show entitled Murder is my business with pictures by Weegee – pen name of Arthur Fellig – one of the most famous photo reporters of the ‘40s in New York; At Chiostri di San Pietro you’ll be spoilt for choice: from Anders Petersen’s reportage of the earthquake that hit the area in 2012 (exhibition curated by Studio Blanco in collaboration with Slamjam) to David Stewart’s Stuff that focuses on the eccentricity of people, and to Andrea Galvani’s Higgs Ocean, curated by Marinella Paderni, which reflects on the natural energy transfer with the artist’s typical poetic approach.
The list is too long and could go on and on, but we cannot avoid closing this overview talking about the first Italian solo show by Peter Sutherland (b. 1976, Ann Arbor, Michigan), entitled Too Young To Care, coming from the collaboration between WONDER ROOM and Studio Blanco, which will be hosted by Spallanzani’s Collection (Musei Civici, Via Spallanzani 1, in the city centre). The American photographer will present a series of unreleased images and archive works that retrace a both intimate and evocative artistic path.
“I have been taking pictures since about 2002.” Sutherland told us. “Around this time my father passed away and photography was a place to focus my energy to, and avoid thinking about that part of me that was lost. I wanted to photograph everything I knew as a child. I did this over the following few years, and it became the backbone for everything else I would do. I have never wanted to control situations or carry a heavy camera, I just want to enjoy what I’m doing and get some poetic images along the journey. I want to go out and explore. I have always been interested in youth cultures because they give kids a chance to express themselves. I grew up skating and snowboarding, and learned so much at a young age from taking part – I was born at a good time, when I started skateboarding, no one had done a “kick flip” yet… -, but things are different today, everything is global and it’s all about the Internet and digital sharing of information.
He explained us how he liked the change: “It inspired me to evolve creatively, making films, installations and then back to photography. I take cellphone photos, do all the social media stuff and appreciate the way it is changing and speeding up trends and the way images behave/exist in the world in general. As for responsibility, we are reconsidering what that is. Once I was listening to John Baldessari being interviewed in an old episode of Art21. He was saying that he doesn’t think images should be owned. He thinks that would be like owning words and wouldn’t make sense. I think I agree with him: if you are uploading images, you are sharing them and you loose control over what happens to them.
I am very interested in things that happen because of photos, not who owns them. In 2006 I took a photo of a deer drinking out of a storm drain in the city. This photo became the cover of a Korean magazine, four years later a beautiful girl wrote to me on Facebook and told me she really liked this picture, she was living in Nepal. In 2010 I visited Nepal, 3 years later we were married in Kathmandu. Keep shooting photos, you never know!”
The exhibition will run until June 16, 2013.
Monica Lombardi – Images Peter Sutherland
