Who is the photographer

by Simeone Andrulli

"The eye exists in a savage state" wrote Andre' Bretton, approximately 80 years ago and in this essay he cited a phrase of the dying Mozart: "I begin to have an inkling of what it would be possible to create with music".

We start all over again, every time, even to fail. Also failures are discoveries like earthquake makes us conscious of Earth, terrible mother. What is a photo? A ring slipped on a finger of a real ghost! Perhaps the ghost let us catch a glimpse of himself only because of that ring. Maybe it is the last fairy tale. Certainly today's photographer is the last man behind his lenses knowing that he must impose on himself the command "once upon time". Trigger and that 'time' is already over; after all, in their own way my images attempt an odyssey, an exploration. A fall from heaven but with heavenly intentions: a taste of distant places.

Visual civilization bombards us, consumes us. It obliges us to see wars, guerrillas, helmeted and masked men, shooting weapons, blood operations with open heart while we have dinner. We are orphans of an oral tradition and a written one afterwards; Gutenberg? Who was he? The new visual tradition will either be saved through images or will die within us. How many images have to be sacrificed in an immense holocaust in order to save just one? Every photograph must be hated until it becomes a proverb, an image of proverbial human phraseology, until it settles in its role of a fairy tale to be passed on. Few art galleries are able to tell their photographic fairy tales, to find the key of fairy tale tradition.

Who is the photographer? Does the photographer know who he is? Other maniacs of films, directors vivisected him but a character expert has not confronted him yet. The photographer takes pictures, psychoanalyzes himself, daydreams on his own, 'rewrites' the choice but nobody has dictated to him who he is supposed to be. A photographer (a real one) obeys to his own game rules, they being demanding, murderous, stingy, omnivorous and fasting afterward. Otherwise the image will refuse to be born. A real image is delivered after a gestation as long as the elephant's one. It is not the click but the wait that counts; the rest is pure technique. It is possible to believe in an image only if it is rich in authentic falsehood. In order to have a creed it is necessary to learn how to lie.

In antique fables there were always magic objects able to rescue us from danger: a walnut, a chestnut, a cherry seed. Warned by the fairies the poor princess or the poor farmer's young daughter, walks and walks and if in danger she could break that walnut, open up that chestnut, crack that cherry seed. When inevitably it occurred, chariots, warriors, magic spirits, sticks able to attack, prodigious ointments come out.

The dark room also is this instrument to utilize at the supreme instant of risk. The "dark room" is not afraid of self censoring, choosing, canceling: it is an implacable placenta. You can't come out of it if you don't have the 'voice' within yourself.

The eye wants its share, photography wants - maybe already has - everything. Loving it, it is hard.

Almost all of us played soccer. Only one over millions will become Pelé. Many beginners in photography who dream to be Pelé are not patient. They eat entire rolls, sink in a camera ocean, try to practice skill. The real man of images knows that an image can come by itself, like a verse. Being punctual at that appointment, with that verse, that's the great game, that's the training, that's the luck. Afterward everything depends on work, on a dedication that must be pedantic and diabolical up to the point of not letting our hand sleep (even Clint Eastwood keeps his hand on his colt under the pillow).

Suddenly out of an image we find something essential: a tiny light in a smile, a tree shape, a fading horizon overthere fixed but dreamt as if running.

If we look at each other maybe we will understand!