Piedmont | Josef Koudelka
Settimo Torinese, Bridge & Rivoli, Castello di Rivoli, Museum of Contempory Art, work by Maurizio Cattelan.
Carema, Via Francigena & Val Varaita.
Turin, lake in front of the Palazzo del Lavoro.
Lake Maggiore; Turin, Lingotto, former Fiat factory, test track; Isola Bella, gardens of the Palazzo Borrome & Robilante, cement works.
Settimo Torinese, construction site for high-speed rail link & Pragelato, livestock market.
The earth in Piedmont is a kaleidoscope of colours. In some areas, it is as red as the soil of India. In others it is almost black. In the interior, it comes in every shade of yellow and brown. Generations of peasants broke their backs in the fields in the hope of being rewarded with a plentiful harvest in the summer months.
The majority of them were so poor that the only food they could afford to eat was polenta, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Big families would crowd around the table en masse to tuck into this peasant fare, perhaps flavored with a few dried anchovies if they were lucky (these would typically have been conveyed on the back of a mule from the neighbouring region of Liguria, to be hung right above the dining table). For many the only way to keep warm was to sleep next to the animals.
Shortly after Bonaparte’s exile in St Helena, the idea of a unified Italy, which had evaporated centuries before with the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, was reborn in Piedmont. Or, at least, an idea of a unified Italy, which many believe has yet to be realized fully. In fact, some maintain that all you would need to do is get behind the wheel of a car and drive from Turin to Trapani in Sicily, via Bolzano near the Austrian border, watching the way the landscape changes beyond the safety barriers, and stopping off at roadside service stations along the way.
– Giuseppe Culicchia
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Koudelka Piedmont
Josef Koudelka : Xavier Barral : Giuseppe Culicchia : Luisa Nitrato Izzo
Thames & Hudson
2009
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The Image as Rememberance | Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Civitavecchia, March 19, 1982
Civitavecchia, March 19, 1982
Bagno Vignoni, 1979-1982
Bagno Vignoni, 1979-1982
Bagno Vignoni, 1979-1982
Just outside Citta Ducale, ‘Church in the Water’, November 1982
An instantaneous mirror of memory, every photograph leaves a motionless trace of what has been, a fixed imprint of something that is no longer what it was before,a silent simulacrum of someone who has disappeared forever from our field of vision. And, as a simple act of remembering, the photograph seems to testify only to the disappearance and death of people and of the feelings that bind us to them, of things and of places where they belong.
Seen in this way, the act of remembrance is the recording of information imposed on the mind by exterior reality, according to the linear logic of necessity, the inexorable law of nature, the Euclidean mechanism of cause and effect that structures and governs human history in the shape of tragedy. The artist Tarkovsky says, must be ‘capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life’,* the deep complex truth of a life in which he was raised as the heir of one of the greatest poets of the generation of Pasternak, Mandekshtam, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.
For the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, Andrei’s father, ‘death does not exist/ we are all immortal/ and everything is immortal. At Seventeen/ one should not fear death, nor at seventy./ Being and light alone have reality, darkness and death have no existence,/ We are all already on the shore of the sea/ and are among those who drag the nets/ while immortality gleams beside them./ Live in the house and it will not fall down./ I shall call forth any century at all,/ to enter into it and build my house./ This is how your children and wives/ will sit with me at the table,/ One sole table for ancestor and descendant./ The future is happening now.’*
Within this genealogy, Andrei Tarkovsky… believes that ‘an artistic image is one that ensures its own development. This image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential of the affirmation of life. Whatever it expresses – even destruction and ruin – the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith. Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.’*
* Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, London, 1986
* Arseny Tarkovsky, ‘Life Life’, in La steppa [The Steppe], Pistoia, 1998
* Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, London, 1994
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Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids
Edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Introduction by Tonino Guerra
Thames & Hudson
2004
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Raf Simons: Redux, 2005
Spring-Summer 2003. Consumed. Photographed by Mario Sorrenti. Syling by Panos Yiapanis. Arena Homme Plus no. 18, 2003.
Isolated heroes no.1: Robbie. Photographed by Raf Simons. Antwerp, 2000.
Autumn-Winter 1999-2000 (flag). Photographed by Raymond Jacquemyns. Antwerp 2005.
Robbie. Photographed by Willy Vanderperre. Styling: Oliver Rizzo. Grooming: Peter Philips. Antwerp, 1999.
Autumn-Winter 2003-2004. Collaboration with Peter Saville. Hand-painting on garments executed by Stef Driesen and Antonia Deluca. Cis, Johan, Peter. Photographed by Willy Vanderperre. Hair: Tom Malomgre. Make-up: Peter Philips. Paris, 2003.
Robbie. Photographed by Willy Vanderperre. Styling: Oliver Rizzo. Grooming: Peter Philips. Antwerp, 1999.
Collier Schorr. Base Portraits/Barracks. New York, 2005.
Spring-Summer 2002. Alexander. Photographed by Kurt De Wit. Grooming: Peter Philips. Paris, 2001.
Video still. Spring-Summer 2002.
Raf and me – we are the Nicky brotherhood. Other people might look at out two members only-congregation as just another Nicky Wire (of Manic Street Preachers) fan club, but both of us know the word “Nicky” means so much more, so we don’t care. For the uninitiated, it would take a long, deep plunge into the complete history and output of the Manics to fully understand, so just take it from me that “Nicky” stands for conviction, fervor, pride, defiance and self-belief against ones own lucky or unlucky fate. When Nicky Wire falls to his knees onstage, bass guitar low, his eyes closed, lost in melody and noise, signing along to to the very words he himself wrote, it’s not your typical freeze-framed rock pose. It’s the very white-out of deliverance and intent and melancholia all true art has, or should have. Life the Nicky way is what all of us like to aspire to. Above all, “Nicky” stands for passion. There’s so, so much passion in Raf’s head and heart. He’s a believer – always. Take anyone working in his office or somehow associated with him as an example. He has this ability to see the spark in people, no matter what background or possible shortcomings. and then fan the flame until it becomes a glowing fire. Passion is what drives his work, too. If there’s one thing I wanted to get across with this book, it’s this; put aside, although never erase, the schoolboy, the robot, the goth drop-out, the protester, the nature kid, the space-age casual. They’re only symbols, indicators. What they really convey is pure emotion without any trickery. Raf has proved that, in one big natural swoop and before the commentators can make their seasonal shopping round-up, fashion can indeed say something all-encompassing and essential about masculinity, society, individuality and freedom. Whispering, wondering, hesitant, shouting, jubilant or unafraid, Raf’s voice has always been for real. And I’m glad that the world has been taking note.
In 1991, Nicky Wire changed my life when he and Richey wrote the lyrics to “Motown Junk”. Five years ago, Raf also radically, positively redirected my own route by inviting me wholeheartedly into his world. If it wasn’t for him, I probably would still hide my strange scribblings and paste-and-cuttings in a box under my bed.
If the cover and the spine of this book could have taken more letters and words, this excerpt from Wire’s Manics lyric should have been the full title, because it truthfully sums up the full ten years of Raf Simons:
“It was no surface but all feeling
Maybe at the time it felt like dreaming”
Raf: Nicky and brotherhood.
– Peter De Potter
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Raf Simons: Redux
Raf Simons : Peter De Potter : Maria Luisa Frisa
Fondazione Pitti Discovery
Milan
2005
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The Image as Rememberance | Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Myasnoye, 1980
Myasnoye, 1980
Myasnoye, September 1980
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, October 2, 1981
Seated on the railing of a balcony against a backdrop of pale birch trees, a handsome woman, her lips closed, gives a hint of a smile. A young solider, his machine gun slung over his shoulder, stares ahead with an intense melancholy, his face stiffening under his bearskin cap, decorated with the five-pointed star of the Red Army. An old house, it’s logs worn and split by the passage of time, stands alone, immersed in the light, along the line of shadow at the edge of a wood.
These are Andrei Tarkovsky’s most beloved black and white images, the ones crucial to his destiny: his mother Maria Ivanovna, his father, Arseny, his childhood home at Ignatievo. Tarkovsky selected, reproduced, and pasted these and other photographs from his family album into a black diary he carried with him. A visual sequence of his life, a presence from the past that would accompany the director in his preparation and making of the film The Mirror and would stay with him, like a portable flashback that could be replayed again and again in moments of home-sickness throughout his short life, right up to his exile in Italy and his death in Paris on December 29, 1986.
Acceptance of the history of the people and the family of his birth, acknowledgment of the cultural tradition in which he was raised, a profound love of the desire for freedom and the creativity of mankind, made in the image and semblance of God: these are the foundations of Tarkovsky’s art. ‘In all my films,’ he wrote, ‘it seemed to me important to try to establish the links which connect people… those links which connect me with humanity, and all of us with everything that surrounds us. I need to have a sense that I myself am in this world as a successor, that there is nothing accidental about my being here. …I always felt it important to establish that I myself belong to a particular tradition, culture, circle of people or ideas.’*
The vitality of his sense of belonging also comes from accepting, acknowledging and loving the little images of his own genealogy, these humble traces of daily life observed through memory, viewed by remembering. Just as the dream sequence that runs through Ivan’s Childhood, awakens the little orphan to the sacrificial fulfillment of his destiny, so too does The Mirror reflect the decisive moments of the story by literally reconstructing those black and white photographs on the set as backgrounds for some of the scenes.
*Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, London, 1986
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Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids
Edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Introduction by Tonino Guerra
Thames & Hudson
2004
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Dash Snow, Muse Magazine, Spring/Summer 2009
Dash Snow photographed by Mario Sorrenti for Muse Magazine, Spring/Summer 2009.
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Monica Carocci, 1995
Untitled I, 1995
Untitled II, 1995
Untitled III, 1995
Monica Carocci, 1995
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Paolo Roversi, Individuallure, Vogue Italia, March 2008
Model: Freja Beha Erichsen
Born in Ravenna, Italy in 1947, Paolo Roversi’s interest in photography was kindled as a teenager during a family vacation in Spain in 1964. Back home, he set up a darkroom in a convenient cellar with another keen amateur, the local postman Battista Minguzzi, and began developing and printing his own black & white work. The encounter with a local professional photographer Nevio Natali was very important: in Nevio’s studio Paolo spent many many hours realising an important apprenticeship as well as a strong durable friendship.
In 1970 he started collaborating with the Associated Press: on his first assignment, the Associated Press sent Paolo to cover Ezra Pound’s funeral in Venice. During the same year Paolo opened, with his friend Giancarlo Gramantieri his first portrait studio, located in Ravenna, photographing local celebrities and their families.
In 1971 he met by chance in Ravenna, Peter Knapp, the legendary Art Director of Elle magazine. At Knapp’s invitation, Paolo visited Paris in November 1973 and has never left.
In Paris Paolo started working as a reporter for the Huppert Agency but little by little, through his friends, he began to approach fashion photography. The photographers who really interested him then were reporters. At that moment he didn’t know much about fashion or fashion photography. Only later he discovered the work of Avedon, Penn, Newton, Bourdin and many others.
The British photographer Lawrence Sackmann took Paolo on as his assistant in 1974. Sackmann was very difficult. Most assistants only lasted a week before running away.
“…he taught me everything I needed to know in order to become a professional photographer. Sackmann taught me creativity. He was always trying new things even if he did always use the same camera and flash set-up. He was almost military-like in his approach to preparation for a shoot. But he always used to say ‘your tripod and your camera must be well-fixed but your eyes and mind should be free'”.
Paolo endured Sackmann for nine months before starting on his own with small jobs here and there for magazines like Elle and Depeche Mode until Marie Claire published his first major fashion story. A Christian Dior beauty campaign brought him wider recognition in 1980, the year he started using the 8 x 10” Polaroid format that would become his trademark. In the middle of the 1980’s the fashion industry was very keen to produce catalogues which allowed photographers to express a very creative and personal work: Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, Romeo Gigli… all gave Paolo that opportunity.
Not only because of the large camera, Paolo has always preferred working in studio. In his first years in Paris, the studio was very often a room from his own different apartments, all on the left bank, until he found in 1981 the studio located in 9 rue Paul Fort where he is still working.
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History of Our World 
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