Critical texts, Italy, Firenze, 10 June 2012
These portraits were taken as “santini” – the small images of saints that some devoted elderly people carry in their wallets as protective and talismanic icons. These individuals, photographed in such a way as to reproduce the format and the iconography of the very icons that they carry are thus presented, embedded in the compartments of a drawer as if in many little tabernacles. They themselves resemble the santini. Yet they are the saints, the beggars, who direct their gaze upon us with the intent to generate the same emotions as those induced by the saints of the santini.
But the photographer's exchanged gaze, which photography has returned to us, is not that of the ordinary passer-by. It is a greedy look, attentive and culturally complex, stimulated by the pathos of the shapes rather than by that of the contents: it is the contemporary eye.
Therefore, the effect of this composition of santini – which also comprises details enlarged by these characters themselves, alongside with features analogous to the saints and the madonnas of the actual santini – is not to move us deeply, but rather to trigger an explosion of images, meanings and a chain of visual and cultural associations that bring us far, both forward and backward in time.
The sacred icon is the most ancient kind of image, born for the archaic eye, which identified the idol (the content) with its visual representation. The icon of the icon is an extreme evolution of the image, its mise en abîme: the image that reflects itself on itself endlessly, undermining the credibility of its meaning.
Lucia Minunno
But the photographer's exchanged gaze, which photography has returned to us, is not that of the ordinary passer-by. It is a greedy look, attentive and culturally complex, stimulated by the pathos of the shapes rather than by that of the contents: it is the contemporary eye.
Therefore, the effect of this composition of santini – which also comprises details enlarged by these characters themselves, alongside with features analogous to the saints and the madonnas of the actual santini – is not to move us deeply, but rather to trigger an explosion of images, meanings and a chain of visual and cultural associations that bring us far, both forward and backward in time.
The sacred icon is the most ancient kind of image, born for the archaic eye, which identified the idol (the content) with its visual representation. The icon of the icon is an extreme evolution of the image, its mise en abîme: the image that reflects itself on itself endlessly, undermining the credibility of its meaning.
Lucia Minunno
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