Kenro Izu / Luigi Ghirri

Territori dello spirito

The first feeling that comes to us is distance and respect. There is shame in the shots by Izu, modesty and gratitude for being in that place, at that moment, and being able to witness the beauty. Izu has been travelling for 30 years, visiting and getting visited by the holy sites of the planet. Out of history, including photos, his equipment was custom built, a unit that revives photographic techniques of the nineteenth-century for platinum prints. The care and attention are the basis of his work, not accuracy but be careful, conscious of being in the presence of works and monuments that the societies have built on divine mandate, drops of eternity crystallized in stone indicating that our time exists scrolling, another time, the sacred, is always.

I felt this music while watching

a trip along the sacred currents of the  places for images that appear taken in another time portraying the subjects in their majestic silence. Where white is light, and therefore almost appearance, such as the magnificent photos depicting Mount Kailash, and the grey scales as density of memory that crowns the places, a vision that we are completely unaccustomed to perceive. Izu’s works can teach us again the art of the look and that’s the art they require.

http://www.fondazionefotografia.org/mostra/kenro-izu/

Arcipelago del mondo antico

These works by Jodice, many are unpublished, are part of the corpus of research dedicated to the Mediterranean and started over 20 years ago. They could also be a short treatise on vertigo, that of time and memory.
Each photo is witness to a meeting, not simply eyes meeting stuff eyes. The force that they give us back is that of the creatures made by stone where the marbles, in the dissolution wrought by time, are not inert. The mastery of Jodice capture their spirit, the aura, we are looked at, fixed, observed. The past judges us. There are statues of deities; places dedicated to the worship, until the meeting with “Roman boy”, the angel of the collection, our guide. Impossible for those who love his writing not to hear the echo of the works of Marguerite Yourcenar, as The time great sculptor, and not feel within himself this music that I propose you from the opera Mare Nostrum by Jordi Savall

The Roman child will accompany us to the end of the trip and the sounds, reassuring us that the nostalgia that we cannot but feel it is a human thing, a nostalgia for a world that belongs to us: the Mediterranean of all peoples.

http://www.fondazionefotografia.org/mostra/mimmo-jodice/

Augusto Petruzzi
18.12.2014

Kenro Izu / Luigi Ghirri
Territori dello spirito / Arcipelago del mondo antico
Skira, 2014