literature

In The Adventure of a photographer Italo Calvino tells the story of Antonino Paraggi and his discomfiture with his friends' enthusiasm for amateur photography, that devoted to the immediate commemorative representation of the present, desirous of saving every moment as a potential future memory, dreamily veiled in melancholy and nostalgia at the very moment in which it falls prey to the camera's gaze. In the eyes of Paraggi, this activity seems destined to shatter against a wall of aporia and contradiction. Where, for instance, do we draw the line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed? If everything that is beautiful should be photographed, then everything that is not photographed is lost; so in order really to live we should photograph as much as we can. Consequently, there would be no room left for choice; we would have to take photographs incessantly, “at least one a minute”¹, but this would simply drive us to madness. On the other hand, anyone wishing to limit themselves to the immortalisation of idyllic, apologetic and consolatory images would exclude the dramatic conflicts of daily life, gradually falling “into mediocrity, into hebetude”².
What Calvino's tale aims to question is the problem of the image's complexity and its conceptual deterioration at the hands of amateur photography. In fact, for Calvino, photographic reproduction of reality involves a myriad of instances and questions of an ethical and social nature, all of which are completely unresolved, coming to touch upon the more general theme of the human relationship with space.
Calvino's series of articles, Collezione di sabbia [Collection of Sand], is the inspiration behind the title of Marco Campanini's latest cycle of photographs, the hallmark of which is his in-depth philosophical investigation into the metamorphic nature of photography and the contemporary image. The artist's research centres upon a corpus of iconographic findings of photographic origin comprising details and snippets of installations and works by contemporary artists not recognisable as such. What we first notice about these images is that they cannot be interpreted with the traditional figurative code; they are completely divorced from the traditional techniques of photographic authoriality. Campanini is not, in fact, their ‘first author', but merely their selector (via the Web) and his entire artistic process is based on a reproduction and a reworking of already existing files available from the Internet. Thus his images attest to a radical relinquishing of the effective purpose of photography, namely the use of an apparatus to expose a film or to create a digital image. At the same time, the images dash any hope of creation as a strong, autonomous, autocratic act, leading us to question whether we can effectively verify their credibility. Indeed, the original authors of the images, their subjects and their origins remain unknown; and this is exactly what happens to almost all of the images that are taken from the Internet and funnelled into mass communication. Campanini erases the traditional aesthetics of autonomy, credibility and identity, and replaces them with a dimension of virtual technology, one that is more mental than real, amorphous and fleeting, confused and indefinite. At the root of this artistic procedure lies a desire to regain a critical approach to the production of images, one that though at the heart of traditional Western aesthetics, has been increasingly devalued and neglected through the use of technology.
Campanini paradoxically implements this critical analysis in his work by breaking down the traditional photographic process, namely focusing the lens, structuring the shot, and so on. His analysis is based on the awareness that the alleged ‘revelatory' and ‘absolute' nature of an image was proof of a virgin territory, one created by a relationship between reality and its capture by photography, a relationship now stale or reduced to a mere industrial repetition by cameras of mass consumption. As early as the 1980s, Vilém Flusser, in his theoretical reflections, wrote that it was indeed this ingenuous photo-diary activity that would trigger the beginning of the end for authentic individual creativity, which would be standardised in its models and tenets by commercial machines produced on an industrial scale. Flusser maintains that the camera is actually a “complex toy”³, a black box the true purpose of which is unknown to the user, who is limited to “playing”⁴, with its preset functions. The technological images produced by these black boxes are therefore not a product of free, intentional creativity, but the use of complex standardised software capable of controlling the unsuspecting user who vainly believes he is exercising creative freewill. Campanini's work aims to focus on this historic process by highlighting its ultimate results and its consequences. This attitude stems from an inevitable disillusionment and is an attempt to recover the real nature and potential of contemporary photographic images by keeping a healthy distance from all forms of ingenuousness. In the photographs of Collezione di Sabbia, the traditional ritual of photography is set aside and replaced by a ‘simple' selection from the material of others. Focusing is replaced by the artist's selective eye, which scours the mare magnum of the contemporary iconographic universe in order to select and highlight the images that best encapsulate the nature and essence of modern man's relationship with space.
Campanini makes a deliberate choice to break off ties with all representative processes by making an almost ascetic choice not to produce new images. It is in this very abstention that the main critical goal of his work resides, the desire to break away from the visual bulimia to which each and every one of us is subjected by the media. The blurring of the line between the real and the virtual, between documentary and fiction, that characterises the average contemporary technical image in the name of advertising, television, or entertainment, in fact, has enveloped our attention span and our capacity to distinguish in a sticky web.
Thus, the artist's decision to work on already existing photographs, that are both aniconic and essential, highlights his desire to eschew the indiscriminate production of images and the unstoppable hypertrophy of today's communication gridlock. Campanini's use of indeterminate images of undeclared authorship unites him with other contemporary artist-photographers, such as Thomas Ruff, who also selects materials from the Web. The German artist has, however, remained close to the figurative recognition of the image, and to its plastic and narrative potential. Campanini, on the other hand, makes more raw and more literal choices by excluding all figurative traces and mimesis from his works, thus adding a radical degree zero where images are only outlines of signs, summaries of shapes and visual paths, now devoid of all philological verifiability. Selection thus reveals itself as a mental space, as a second degree place of creation based upon the wealth of freely accessible technological images created by others.
Campanini's work is therefore a conceptual provocation, an exercise in suspicion that aims to reawaken consciousness as to the real nature of contemporary technological images. At the root of the images on display lies a synthetically analytical approach that aims to highlight the rigid technological process behind the photographic object. Campanini favours iconographies that reveal the ‘structure' of photography, namely the series of technical, scientific and cultural procedures that make the existence of the image possible. Not therefore ‘superstructural' photography as an exercise in style and variation on a theme, but photography as cold analysis and constant cultural reflection rather than formal elaboration.
It now becomes clear why Calvino's title was chosen for this work: on one hand the collection of sand alludes to the fate of contemporary technical images, which are destined to crumble to dust, abandoned to a fate of vacuity and inexorable multiplicity; on the other it tells of possible redemption and renewal. What Calvino called the “siliceous structure of existence⁵ overshadows human ability to distil wealth from dispersion and fresh critical qualities from erosion, all through the exercise of critical thought.
Campanini seems to welcome this suggestion to focus attention on the ethical need for selection, in terms of a self-critical exercise in discernment and evaluation, as the exercise of autonomy and unconditioned will, within an iconographic universe that today is broken beyond repair.

Luigi Fassi