Photography between Painting and Philosophy
There are thousands different ways of travelling and as many ways of travelling taking photographs. Yet the one chosen by Marco Campanini is absolutely original as it follows the “promenade picturale”, an eighteenth-century literary genre according to which the route was the fictional image of a painting. This project – composed of 40 photographs with a good title, Lo Specchio e il Mito (The Mirror and the Myth) – is influenced not only by photography but also by philosophy and literature. As a matter of fact the young photographer from Parma clearly refers to the highly imaginative travel made by Diderot with the marinas by Claude Vernet, to the dreams of middleclass people during the Grand Tour, to the linguistic experimentations of Borges, Calvino and the Oulipo group. His aim is therefore to move the lens near the pages of a book, near a painting or an ancient print and to let lights and shadows create a panorama the film then catch it turning it into a clear picture. Though it is clear and already declared that the photographer followed the style of Luigi Ghirri in Atlante and Paesaggi di cartone, Campanini creates a personal style. To him his virtual landscapes are like hypotheses used to assess reality and his pictures are just the inevitable consequences of his own cultural influences. He studies philosophy and he wants to focus on the conceptual similarity between photography and philosophy. And in that regard he searches for a place that is both inside and outside and he also tries to photograph the page not to reproduce it but to interpret it. Using a reflex with macro lens and just natural light the photographer got really efficacious effects. The page livens up, shadows cross faces, characters and battlefields making images unexpectedly lively. This is just what happened with writing. Readers can in fact travel though they don't move. And even the pictures by Campanini, taken within his house, lead us to a fictional outside world and enable us to think using images, as Luigi Ghirri had already guessed.
Roberto Mutti