Tag: Review

by Luca Fiore

Family Car Trouble, Gus Powell’s latest book, is a photographic novel. It is about family photos taken in the months leading up to the death of his father, Peter, in 2015. At the same time the photographer sees his daughters, Townes and Maude, as they grow up, play and learn about the world. Peter is portrayed in bed or sitting in an armchair, with the signs of a throat operation that made him dumb. The two little ones run around the house, having fun in the snow or walking in the woods. Then the family’s events intertwine with that of Jimmy, the nickname of the 1993 Volto 940 Turbo station wagon that goes in and out of the workshops for never-resolving interventions.

The girls sleep with their heads resting on the door, dance standing on the roof, play with a pinwheel moved by the wind coming in through the window. Peter turns off little by little, with dignity. From the pillow he seems to be looking up at the ceiling. Then, as you turn the page, his eyes seem to point to the image besides, where Townes and Maude move carefree in the living room. The light innocence of the granddaughters softens the gravity of their grandfather’s slow decline, while the red lights on the dashboard of the Volvo light up like a Christmas tree. At Lucky’s Automotive, the local garage, they do what they can with Jimmy, who has once again arrived with a tow truck.

It’s hard to linger on the funeral portrait of Peter, whose lifeless face is illuminated by the red light in the funeral parlor. Then we see the colours of a sunset from the rain-soaked windshield. Then, still through the glass, a green light. And again a road through the woods. The book closes with Powell from the driver’s seat portraying his daughters sitting on the hood looking out to sea. At a certain point the older one opens her arms and leans forward, as if she wants to embrace the world.

Powell (New York, 1973) made a name for himself in the Street Photography community in the 2010’s, participating in the In-Public collective (which included Joel Meyerowitz and Richard Kalvar, among others). His first images (collected in “The Company of Strangers”, 2003) he called them “Lunch Pictures”: he shot during his lunch break while working as photo editor for the New Yorker. Shots that fit perfectly into the genre that, par excellence, focuses on the “decisive moment”. Over the years, however, his approach to street photography has changed, becoming less narrative and more poetic, as evidenced by “The Lonely Ones”, his 2015 book.

With “Family Car Trouble” (TBW Books) Powell seems to go one step further, taking the narrative vocation out of the single image. If in Street Photography the single shot is a story in itself, here it ends up poured into the sequence of moments that take on strength as a whole. Editing, like editing in cinema, generates the story and enhances the single image by linking it to the previous and the next one.
It cannot be said that it is a photographic diary: Powell does not show his daily life. Or, at least, he doesn’t show it all: rather, he uses elements of his biography as narrative lines for an interweaving of symbolic themes (death, childhood, the unexpected). This allows the story to present itself, at the same time, as personal and universal. And Powell succeeds, inventing the image of the car that loses its shots, in a rare feat for a photographer: he knows how not to take himself too seriously.
A book, as Alec Soth described it as the best photographic volume published in 2019, “as humble, robust and adorable as his 1993 Volvo”.

Il Foglio, 6th May 2020

by Luca Fiore

Recently, the frequency of publications (two a year) which Guido Guidi has accustomed us to, along with his publisher Michael Mack, might seem a little excessive. In the space of ten years, the photographer from Cesena has emerged from the shadows and become considered, for all intents and purposes, a master on the international stage. This is certainly, in part, thanks to the platform granted him by his English publisher. In 2018, his Per Strada was ranked in the list of the best ten books of the year by the New York Times. In 2019, it was the turn of In Sardegna, with the great exhibition at the Man in Nuoro, and of In Veneto. In the meantime, the Californian publisher Tbw Books has included Fuori Casa in its prestigious annual series, which includes stars of the photography world such as Gregory Halpern, Jason Fulford and Viviane Sassen. Such volumes collated works that Guidi created within the last fifty years, and which today are emerging from his drawers in more complete form; or even, in some cases, as unpublished series. The more time passes, the more his work is appearing in all its generous vastness and depth.

2020 has begun with Lunario, a collection of images shot between 1968 and 1999, which asserts, perhaps definitively, the impossibility of classifying Guidi as a ‘genre’ photographer, linked solely to architecture or landscape.

The book moves in numerous directions. On the one hand, the moon is shown as a mysterious element of the landscape which marks the passing of time, like a clock. On the other, we see everyday objects, themselves presented as lunar metaphors: a pruning knife hanging on the wall; the projection of a semi-circular light source on a wall; a ball which Anna, his daughter, throws repeatedly against the wall. Then there are the images created through experimentation with the photographic medium; the 1967 triple portrait of Mariangela Gualtieri, whose face initially appears only lit from the left, then from behind, and then only from the right. Or the landscapes of the Po delta shot with a fish-eye lens, which, with their circular contours, appear as solitary moons comprised of land and sky.

Yet the hidden gem of this book is its final series, shot during the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999. Guidi captures his wife as she observes the darkening of the sun with 8”x10” photographic film. As he turns, he notices on the wall of his Ronta home (the same against which, in the 80s, Anna bounced her moon-ball) a phenomenon never seen before. For a moment, he is confused. It is the phenomenon Aristotle once questioned in his Book of Problems: “Why is it that during eclipses of the sun, if one views them through a sieve or a leaf – for example, that of a plane-tree or any other broad-leaved tree – or through the two hands with the fingers interlaced, the rays are crescent-shaped in the direction of the earth?”. This is what is happening on the plaster in front of Guidi: on the wall, the shadow is no longer leaf-shaped, but takes the sickle shape of the eclipse. Guido Guidi turns his tripod around and begins to shoot. Five black and white photos. Then four in colour. The sequence captures the appearance and disappearance of Aristotle’s phenomenon. It is one of the moments in which Guidi considers himself “measurer” of time and space. “I was not so interested in the atmosphere”, he explains in the interview with Antonello Frongia which concludes the book, “as with the physical-optical fact of the crescent moon”.

Yet, looking at that plot of light and shadow animated mysteriously on the wall at Ronta, it is difficult not to think of the sky, the solar system, the universe, and the immensity our small eyes find themselves in. An immensity of which we cannot help but ask ourselves the meaning. These are topics which, in a more or less explicit manner, emerge in the interview with Frongia. It is a text which presents the scope of the cultural horizon Guidi is capable of, and has the power of a lectio magistralis.

Il Foglio, 22th January 2020

by Luca Fiore

Ólafsfjörður is a fishing village in northern Iceland, at the mouth of the Eyjafjörður fjord. It is home to 800 souls. In summer, in this region, the sun does not set: it approaches the horizon, but never disappears fully. This phenomenon reaches its peak on July 1; then, gradually, darkness reconquers the night. In summer 2017, the Belgian photographer Bastiaan van Aarle – class of 1988 – went to Ólafsfjörður and took 31 photos; one of each day in July, all taken at the same time: 01.20 at night, the least lit moment of the day. With these images, he composed his first book, published a few weeks ago by the German publisher Hatje Cantz, entitled “01:20”. The minimalist but elegant design, with a paperback cover, befits the profile of the newcomer van Aarle, who required an online crowdfunding campaign to help cover publication costs. The book’s subjects include typical Icelandic houses with corrugated sheet roofs, a church by the port, the village’s shops, a gas station, a fish processing factory, a swimming pool and a school. Next to the homes are parked cars; all around are mountains with the last snow of the season, and rivers running through the valleys. The streetlights, needlessly lit, are the only hint of the nocturnal hour. There is not a single soul on the streets. At that time, even in Iceland, the world is asleep. Everything seems to resound with a complete silence, perhaps broken only by the wind.

Leafing through the book, one sees days pass, and the sky darkening continuously: it is as if we are complicit in a sunset which, in reality, never happened. In the first photos, one perceives an unreal atmosphere; yet this is fruit of the mind’s short-circuiting, informed in advance as we are of the time of shooting. As light progressively leaves the images, page after page, so too does the village itself, with the collection closing with shots of almost night-time countryside.

This collection calls to mind the series of photographs of white nights shot by Joel Meyerowitz in Saint Petersburg at the start of the 90s. Images which cannot help but recall us to Dostoevsky: “It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky”. The American photographer lingered upon the decadent beauty of the mansions along the Neva river, the classical columns, the reddening clouds, the reflections of monuments in the fountains. The white night was a place of dreams. Unlike the story Van Aarle is telling in Ólafsfjörður.

The melancholy of the Icelandic nights appears more bitter. Symbols of daily life – the simple geometry of the houses, the small and austere Nordic settlements, the odd crumbling wall, rust attacking the sheets of metal on the roofs – this all suggests a shadow of solitude. Any road, seen at night and void of any human presence, offers a similar impression. Yet here, the light gives a definitive note to this sense of abandon.

In a passage in the volume, the Belgian poet Bob Vanden Broeck writes: “The power of this artist lies in uniting two contrasting elements in a single photograph: beauty and sadness. This is poetry, and is what makes Ólafsfjörður a fascinating place. Here, in a single day, one can weep both from seeing a stunning landscape, and for a future void of hope, resting here like a rusty shed”.

Yet this book also offers something else. A white night – the surprise of light which, by all accounts, should not be there. Where we expect darkness, light fights back. Each of us can contemplate our own darkness and shadows. Those which we might prefer to keep hidden. It is a small yet great lesson. To learn it, someone needed to take the trouble of travelling to Ólafsfjörður. To take 31 photographs.

Il Foglio, 5th November 2019