A personal visual diary
on
The Art of Disease
by
Mauro Fiorese

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Chapter 11
Despair&Hope/B&W

 

Besides everything I’m sharing here with you now, my disease, my hope, my desperation, my smiles and my tears, my light and my shades, let me tell you a couple of things on the photographs you’ve been watching here.
Let me tell you, first, why they are on Black and White. And in order to explain that I’m going to borrow a quote by Robert Frank, one of the artists who use photography that I admire the most.
Once he said : “Black and White are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected” *.

It’s all, simply about that: we play our game between Loss and Win. Between Black and White. It’s all about balance, about shades of grey. Robert Frank also said that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. He said “It is important to see what is invisible to others, perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness”. And here were are again! In fact the first time I’ve read this my mind and my heart went instantly to another quote – this time from my childhood – and I’m sure you all remember a little Prince that once said something about what is “essential”.
I totally agree that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly”.
But for me
what is INVISIBLE
is ESSENTIAL
to the EYE.
I prefer this version.
By saying this I simply mean that my images here, with my words, are just inputs.
What I hope, here, is to raise memories as well as questions.
I hope to leave enough space to you to finish my photographs.
I hope you can take your photographs for you, first.
I hope you have some thoughts in your mind before you take your photograph.

Thoughts are always invisible before the vision but once the picture becomes food for your eyes, than you’ll be able to read my mind as well.

On chapter 7, I wrote that for the first time in my life I’m now pointing the lens toward the most incomprehensible subject: me. It took me such a long time to do that without thinking about it as a selfie. Maybe it took me too much time.
But since today I spent so much time alone and I think so much before I shoot a photograph, I realized that being alone also means thinking more towards the inner self of me instead of thinking just toward the outside.

We were born and we are here to live, not to survive. And if this seems too obvious for you, well… maybe you need to slow dow a bit. Like I did.

Somebody said that “a picture worth more than a thousand words”.
So, if you want to communicate with pictures, you better know those thousands words first.
Today.

* Robert Frank in Aperture, vol. 9, no. 1 (1961) pp. 20-22

Mauro Fiorese all rights reserved
March 2015

to be continued….