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TOSCANA, OCCHI NEL SILENZIO
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| Introduction |
With this new volume of photographs, my first in black and white, I wanted to take up the landscape once again, not just in its authentic form, but, above all, as my eyes would always like to see it.
For this reason, I have tried to enter on tiptoes, respecting and awaiting its flow. You must not be in a hurry when wishing to reproduce the sensations that permeate you, when seeing a beautiful thing, whatever it might be.
Alone, wrapped in silence, lest I lose the magic of the moment, I have finally regained the peace that comes over you when you feel the perfumes of nature, which are not so much those that stimulate your sense of smell, but those that you can enjoy with your sight.
I do not intend to make a documentary with this book; that does not interest me, even though each shot does represent a document; in my photos, I wanted to remove the hubbub of man, giving prominence to those fogs that envelop everything, to those paths that you travel in your imagination and that take you to the summit of your dreams, to the solitude of man in life's journey, to the extraordinary beauty of the sea, which makes us feel small and helpless before its majesty
Duccio Nacci
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| Presentation |
This new collection of photographs by Duccio, "Eyes in the silence", appears to harbour a contradiction in its very title: an element germane to vision, sight, is brought together with another, silence, belonging to a different sensory domain, hearing. The meaning assigned to the matching of these two terms is closely linked to the poetic bent that has always been the stylistic mark of the photographer's collections; this is now confirmed in a title that refers to one of the most captivating rhetorical tropes in the language of poets: the synaesthesia.
The glances of which this book makes us a gift have this deep purpose: to convey sensations that do not belong to sight only, albeit the visual dominates in our society and in our times and is the peculiar trait of the photographic art; to strive to equip the image with the ability to also communicate other sensations, auditory and tactile; to succeed in combining vision with elements belonging to other sensory modes.
Duccio's shots invite us to supplement their documentary and visual nature with the sensations that emerge at the moment when, starting from a more focused and active observation, we implicate the other senses and finally achieve a more intimate perception, that of occupying the universe of our emotions and feelings. This is where we will find the message that Duccio wants to convey: photography and poetry cross paths in his work not so much because of an experimentalism aimed exclusively at artistic medley or technique; what underlies this chapter of his work is the will to provide a rest to the eyes and regenerate the sight, saturated and weighed down, in our society, by a continuous and uninterrupted flow of images. What we are being offered is a kind of re-education to a vision that ought to be attentive, aware, focused; a vision that enables us to discover elements, details, nuances, and all that tends to get lost in the rush of our frantic lives.
Once beyond the limits of visual perception, the landscape, that favourite among the book's subjects, evolves into what the subject wants it to become: inner urges, desires, and needs are projected onto it. Photography becomes the means of lifting the curtain on a scene containing the interior spaces that say so much about us, about our human condition. One of last century's major photographers, and a master of the landscape, Ansel Adams, would describe great photography as "a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety."
At the light of this statement, Duccio's images show themselves fully permeated with his sensitivity towards the environments in which he acts and they offer themselves as opportunities for a voyage of, not exclusively visual, rediscovery.
Freed from the compulsion to see much, too much, and in a rush, we are invited to discover other means of enjoying the image: with other senses first, and then in a state of concentration and peace, until we enjoy the pure landscapes, which, in the end, have nothing human and show nature's continuity, its message of power and indifference that often we are unable to perceive, drowned as we are in artificial noises, in too human surroundings from which it is sometimes necessary to take a pause.
The rediscovery of man, his value and his capacity to observe and imagine lies in the flight from noise and from the frantic rhythms of these realities; and a landscape from which we can picture ourselves absent lies beyond this. A reality thus emerges, made of silence, smells, and sounds rediscovered as independent of man himself and in which man is invited to meet their very essence again.
It is by this route that, shedding our own form, suspending it to later enter it again with surprise, we find again within ourselves the capacity to enjoy the nature surrounding us and to understand the inner, fleeting, and ephemeral significance that we have in it; we look at reality as suspended, we abandon our everyday, habit-worn vision to glean expressions that we would otherwise miss in the world surrounding us.
"Eyes in the silence" harbours all elements of nature (earth, water, air, and fire) that become the unchallenged main characters in various territories and environments.
There are seascapes, in which the sea talks to us, seems to brush our skin with its large and soft hands, making us a gift of tactile emotions. The rocks, with their dripping shapes, seem to surface from the depth as if newly made, created a few instants ago; and their look recalls a Max Ernst's canvas, created by frottage. Human presence is reduced to a minimum: a small image against the background of sky, sea, and land all coming together; a body lying on the knotty tree-trunks that the water recomposes into bizarre constructions; the walls of an ancient building that resists, by clinging to a place not yet reached by the power of the sea; the everyday implements used by fishermen in their ancient toil, now corroded by water and rust; the distant glare of a village lying on an island that seems to be swallowed by the sky.
There is the earth landscape that comes together in the hills, in the soft curves where the human presence and hand are evident; but here too, the fog, present in many images, seems to want to take away or limit all reference to human presence in the landscape. In the images free of fog, it is the snow that reminds us that human traces are but transient signs, guests in a wholly natural canvas.
In other shots where humans are present, within San Gimignano's walls or in the roads that unravel amid the hills, their presence is always dominated by a detail in the image that emphasises the theme of the journey that joins us all. We then perceive in the landscape the existential dimension of the passage: a road opens up amid lighted cypresses, witnesses and monumental milestones of our travel, or among the boughs of the bush gilded by sunlight; the old, the women, the men, and the children travel together their route towards a stormy sky, or immersed in the midday of summer that expands all things, suddenly welcomed around a curve by the bells of a parish church, or surrounded by the golden fields before the harvest, where one tries to glean the premonitory signs of one's own journey in the trail that softly trims the crests of the hills.
In one of the book's shots, a great and old tree is captured from the interior of a church. Above the old main door, boughs appear to enclose this glimpse of landscape within a vegetable frame and the entire image is contained within the interior's dark contours. This photograph seemed to reveal the work of a photographer able to capture in the framing and with his shot, in the unceasing regeneration of nature's countless forms, the composition that emerges at a precise moment, the whole of the elements that find an arrangement on the paper, the form and the balance apt to relate both beauty and the all human illusion that leads us to believe that we have captured it forever.
Samuele Petrocchi
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