Book Prologue
We are made of a set of influences. I surrender to these with great pleasure, accepting the fact as indisputable. Over the years, influences change and blend with what I consider personal choices. Thus, in the end, I cannot distinguish where my initiative ends and where my other-directed illumination begins. Through the passage of time, some influences remain unchanged, and from being inaccessible lighthouses, they become shadows of familiar companionship with which I share a timeless complicity, a source of admiration and pleasure, but also deep consolation. In my life, I feel this way about Bach and Mozart, Fellini and Ozu, Proust, Dostoevsky, and Yourcenar, Rembrandt and Goya, Pina Bausch and Tadeusz Kantor, but fortunately also many others.
Regarding my purely photographic influences, they are countless. The great ones who introduced me to photography are now complemented by several younger ones. Because the pleasant thing is that, as much as I complain about the naive postmodern and conceptual exaggerations, I also encounter serious work from young and sincere photographers. I owe my love for photography to Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Josef Sudek, August Sander, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Julia Margaret Cameron, Carleton Watkins, Paul Strand, Roy de Carava, Bruce Davidson, Bill Brandt, and alongside them have been added Craigie Horsfield, Bernard Plossu, and a series of old and new ones, who continue to excite and surprise me.
Over time, through influences, readings, experiences, and thoughts, as well as our own character, some unwritten general principles regarding the values that govern the artistic work are formed, which we almost unconsciously seek to appreciate anything new. These principles acquire for each of us the weight of objective truth. They seem so indisputable to us that they do not admit counterarguments. However, their expression stumbles on the inability of language to convey what we consider indisputable. Logical reasoning is not enough.
Simplicity, austerity, purity, and honesty are the first principles I find in all the great works that inspire me. Concepts that are harder to apply as they are more hermetic in their perception. These principles are complemented by rigor, abstraction, discretion, and implication. Through these, the work generates emotion, not feelings. It implies and does not proclaim. It hides and promises more than it overtly shows, but at the same time shows exactly what it promises and hides. It uses the language and symbols of its form and artistic metaphor, not resorting to the language and symbols of logical reasoning. It offers the viewer the joy of intensity, born from the dialogue between a mental and an aesthetic contemplation, not the joy due to the flattery of the mind and the senses. It resists interpretation with the weapon of its polysemy and does not fall into the finite limits of its analysis. It expresses the need and the inherent pleasure of the creator, not his philistinism. It covers the difficulty of its construction with naturalness and does not exhibit it to justify its presence.
Realizing these principles leads to a one-way street, where the pleasures, for the artist or the art lover, are fewer but more intense, and disappointments are daily. Nowadays, however, such principles function more as counterpoint advice. Perhaps because artists try to compete with the ephemeral successes of the diametrically opposite aesthetic of the media and lifestyle, fearing (and possibly rightly so) that they will be judged by the breadth and speed of their acceptance. I would not dare to recommend the respect of these principles, because it is something that, once noticed, you can no longer ignore, and if you cannot see it, there is no way someone can impose it on you.
Knowledge, principles, magnitudes, and comparisons all rely on the past. The new work exists as a work (and not as a "contrivance") only in relation to the past. And the language used by the artist is defined in relation to it. Past and not tradition, a concept laden with a dimension of transmission, turning us into carriers of values and habits, from beings independently influenced. The past does not negate the present and the future. It is indeed necessary to define them. That is why I look with surprise and skepticism at the contemporary tendency to deny, or rather deliberately ignore, the past. Especially in the realm of art, the past is the art itself.
Many young artists strive at all costs to innovate. They thus put the plow before the horse, since logically one first creates and then realizes the potentially new that the creation contains. The opposite process generates hollow neologisms. Moreover, as Cartier-Bresson also notes in an interview, "there are no new ideas in the world. Only new arrangements of things. Or," he continues, everything is new. Every minute is new. The world is born and destroyed every moment." And Yourcenar notes that this new that artists chase reminds her of the labels on coffee boxes advertising the "new" product, the "new" blend.
My personal references to the past of art substantiate my contemporaneity of art. It is not a retrospective in its history. Therefore, these references I reshape through our contemporary gaze and the current feasible approaches. I simply accept that if a work, whenever it was made, can (in any way, even by reacting against it) move today, me or anyone else, then for me and the other, the work is timely. In this sense, the past is precious, necessary, creative to me.
The most natural, spontaneous, and dynamic element of photography is its ability to collect memories. And this was the starting point of my enthusiasm. Knowledge followed. My first photographs were clearly influenced by Kertész, even thematically. However, over time my knowledge and my intrinsic influences have increased so much that I no longer know if I am (and by whom) influenced.
The charm that photography, schematically called "street photography," exerted on me and many others of my generation made me wander for quite some time trying to present something interesting in this so difficult field. Sometimes with the calm of the European and sometimes with the nervousness of the American school. Perhaps because I had not realized in time how much time (and how many kilometers) "street photography" requires, or because I had not clarified my real preferences and interests, I failed to present something complete, which I could honestly defend.
The following era, the '80s, was marked by the disdain for photography (many photographers chose the socially flattering title of artist, not the plebeian one of photographer), by the rise of conceptualism, and by the fashion of postmodernism. I had great respect for the visual arts and great love for photography to play this superficial and easy game. On the other hand, I had already surpassed the adolescent need for distinction and exposure, which these blurred mixtures would have secured with greater certainty.
However, the pure and sincere journalistic or social contemplative photographs, which many noteworthy photographers continued to make, did not interest me. Moreover, I neither intended to sell them nor wanted (or could) change the world. Thus, I turned to researching the intermediate space, that is, the space between absolute description, the quintessential privilege of the photographic image, and the personal sense (not interpretation) of this description. A combination of both the window and the mirror, according to John Szarkowski's appropriate distinction, to whose theoretical work I owe so much.
I don't believe chaos and disorder help artists. On the contrary, setting, albeit flexible, boundaries can liberate their creativity. I set these boundaries for myself early on. Photography is the medium I happened to serve. Perhaps not the most famous and probably the poorest. So, my first goal is to exploit precisely these qualities and not to renounce them, pretending something that photography is not. As, for example, happens with the poor imitations of painting, the preciousness of the painterly result, the role of galleries, and the high prices. Photography is a reproducible image. Trying to turn it into something unique, thus essentially seeing it as an object and not an intangible image, places it in competition with forces it cannot confront and control, such as the materiality of the painter's presence and the uniqueness of the visual object. Photography describes without narrating. Whatever informational and narrative elements emerge, they are not due to it, but to the captions, accompanying texts, and the viewer's personal knowledge or references. The photographic image simply shows. It neither interprets nor analyzes. As soon as it attempts to do something like that, it becomes self-contradictory and ridiculous. The challenge of photography lies in its contradictions. In the fact that it describes something alive and existing, while the viewer perceives that (through various choices) substantial, albeit underground, transformations have infiltrated. As well as that such an objectively specific description is accompanied by the most blatant subjective abstraction.
In short, I believe it is my duty to try (to the extent of my abilities) to extract from photography the most substantial it can offer with the tools it possesses. With the respect that every creative relationship presupposes and demands from both parties, so is my relationship with photography; I wish to make the language of photography transparent while manifesting my presence. Without either party pretending something it is not. This is a triple relationship of honesty connecting the world, the medium (photography), and the creator. And these are precisely the three aspects that constitute the three corresponding dimensions of the art of photography. The subject, the composition, and the content. Dimensions that must coexist while being distinct.
For substantial and coincidental reasons, the photographic process could not and did not want to take the first, and even less the only, relationship in my life. I am not, nor did I want to become, the photographer with the camera glued to the eye, living through his photography. All my activities are equally important to me, and above all, I photograph because I live and do not live to photograph. I wanted to integrate photography into life and not the opposite. Therefore, I chose to photograph infrequently but methodically, devoted for a few hours to my subject, during which the rest of my life and other activities are automatically invoked. My photography, therefore, subconsciously captures in a few hours, and through a subject, what I live all the rest of the time.
I also decided that, in agreement with my beliefs, I want to photograph things that attract and do not repel me, even if through them I wish to express disgust or despair. I feel, therefore, that photography (and perhaps all art) cannot portray the ugly, because it is anyway beautified through the process and form. However, it allows it to exist as a threat and implication. And it leaves the initiative to the receiver to weigh what appears, what is hidden, and their struggle. My desire is to emphasize the spirituality of the material world, the charm of every nightmare, the beauty of the agony of time, the creative power of sorrow, in short, to show myself and those I love and appreciate, that is, my audience, why life, despite so much fear and despair, ultimately fills me with so much joy.
I may fear saying all this in photographs of people, as they mainly move and torment me. I may be able to do so soon. However, I realized in the meantime that the material world surrounding us, nature and human works, reflects the time that binds us, and incorporates our fears and joys. The worn-out chair we struggle to throw away, the flaws of a wall that become its identity, the grass embracing the remnants of a house, the beauty of the statues we loved destroyed, are nothing but the strange tenderness that the terrifying course of time generates in and around us.
These thoughts (and this is the wonderful thing about photography) do not accompany me when, with the camera in hand, I seek the balance between the sky, the stone, and the soil. There I simply live, perhaps a little more carefree and relaxed. And I choose my frames based on the attraction and charm they exert on me. Everything else follows. Ultimately, the photograph itself creates its content.
The unfortunate habit of our days requiring artists to talk, and a lot, about their works, both before and after they are made, usually exposes them to the eyes of sincere and serious people, but I very much fear also to their own. The photographer's attempt to adjust his work to what he promised to show turns him into an illustrator of commonplaces, while the opposite effort, namely to invest his work with the exhibition of ideas, if sincere, will fall far short of the ambiguity of the images, and if cunning and directed, will replace the work, degrading it.
I fear that I am distinguished by a tendency to rationalize and organize, something that, by contrast, pushes me even further from what I dislike, namely the artist who can control everything in advance. Therefore, I show distrust towards the thematic entrapment of photography. It is indeed a fact that we all need a subject as a pretext, and we all have an idea behind our head (if you prefer, call it a concept). But personally, I prefer to stop there and allow my photos to discover their affinities on their own. What I do is follow procedures and forms. Therefore, the choice of camera angle, aperture, film type, and print format, as well as the conditions, places, and areas I photograph, is very important for the view I support. These technical and practical choices deeply determine my content, almost without my knowing. I can even say that, if I perceive and diagnose the operation of this process, I become weary because I lose the surprise, which even the result of my own work should reserve for me. I prefer to discover myself in my photographs and not to construct them according to an idea I have about them.
The affinity of the photos in this album emerged gradually. They have been taken in different areas and reflect elements of different cultures. However, they are all fragments of my mind, moments of my life, and fixations of my gaze. The captions inform, without intending to illuminate the content of the image, and exist only to satisfy curiosity, without intervening in the approach. I know that photographic and publishing success is better ensured with a narrowly thematic presentation of photographic images. However, I am skeptical about collections of images whose affinity is due only to the depicted thematic unity. First, because they provide the excuse for the presence of mediocre photos under the umbrella of a specific and unified theme, and secondly, because they offer the viewer the most obvious interpretation of their presence. One needs only to read photography reviews to see that journalists nine times out of ten resort to the redeeming analysis of the depicted subject.
I do not think I would like to analyze my photos. However, I am very happy when I see that they generate different reactions in different people, provided these reactions are positive and strong. Besides, I do not think that a photographic work says something absolutely specific. Usually, the intensity it emits (if it is interesting), due to its internal contradictions, the transformation of details and their relationships, the references and implications, the areas possibly devoid of information, the cutting off of the non-depicted world, and the abstraction in which it hovers, is what generates the creative reaction from the viewer. This reaction interests and moves me much more than the logical analysis, which draws its information from the usually obvious references to the subject.
The photographs I took in the style of "street photography," the dance photos, the statues, the ruins, and the female portraits cover the first period of my photographic life. Some samples from these are included in the first part of this album. These, along with the photographs that have occupied me in recent years, included in the second part of the album, share something common: a theatricality. The sense of an organization of space and time that real life does not allow us to perceive. It seems I need this order, which even in the most ruined ruin I believe exists. Unconsciously I seek proof that the world is in place and that, no matter how one stirs it, it will find its place again. Or, in other words, that beauty, born of harmony, exists in the whole because it exists in the smallest details and because it follows time, does not age but transforms. It is ultimately beyond space and time. Photography, hooked as it is to reality and with the strange property of speaking of space while lacking depth, and of time while moving in its fractions, has the power to ascertain what exists and to hint at all we imagine, creating the illusion that what we have captured is indeed there, while at the same time we have invented it. The accurate depiction of space and time ends in their reconstruction. The photographs of the two periods (although the clear chronological distinction is somewhat arbitrary) are distinguished by a different approach, partly enhanced by the change of camera and format. The photos of the first period try to "come alive" and "escape" from the frame, characterized by internal movement and sounds. The photos of the second period discovered stillness and silence.
Although I have often been fascinated by photos with blurry and unclear areas, I never wanted to do the same with mine. Perhaps because I felt that for me, the beauty, harmony, suffocation, and agony of a world "born and destroyed at every moment" is more dramatically rendered with the clinical accuracy of its description. The perfect, almost unnatural, clarity of the exceedingly good lenses of Leica and later Hasselblad, combined with the closed apertures, were some of the tools that helped me render reality with such precision that it seemed distorted.
Choosing black-and-white film was almostobvious and natural for me. I do not rule out turning to color at some point, nor do I theoretically or even less dogmatically renounce it. However, black-and-white photography offers me infinite colors. It reduces the significance and differences of objects while enhancing the gravity of artistic language. It allows movement in a world where very important parts contain no information, unlike color, which always contains information, that of its own color. It helps in the implication of depth and simultaneously gives the joy of the momentary, which the sketch has, and the three-dimensional plasticity of volumes, which sculpture has. After all, black and white is part of the flexible (hence surmountable) limits I have set for myself.
The square format was a challenge and even accidental. But once I "discovered" it, I realized its strictness suits me. The four similar sides create a constraint, more than solving a problem. This external imposition (comparable to that of black and white against the colored world) imposes more difficult conditions on the creator, adopting a more unnatural framework of representation. The stricter and more austere the "game's" rules become, the more the difficulty of resolving the continuous minor problems, the successive micro-choices among which the artist must move, increases. However, at the same time, the potential successful resolution can lead to a more significant work. The magnitude of the problem determines the quality of the outcome.
The importance that printing has in photography is, although undeniable, very small compared to the taking and selection after it. The instructions a photographer can give to the print technician are enough to support his work. These instructions can even vary from time to time, causing slight aesthetic shifts in the work, but not radical upheavals. I fear that those who claim that the quality and style of the prints have a decisive weight in the importance of photography do so out of distrust in the value of the rest of the photographic process. They think that this way, photography comes closer to its heterologous and unrelated sister, painting, with which, as happens in many families, more separates than unites them.
Something similar happens with sizes. The habit of the times dictates their enlargement. The larger, the better. I believe that sizes have more to do with spaces and less (or almost none) with the work itself. The difference between a small published book photo and a larger exhibited one is not a size difference but a function difference. And it is an extremely important difference, with my preference leaning towards publication and not exhibition. The difference in frame dimensions within the room is a matter of presbyopia or myopia and distance in centimeters. All the rest serve those who deal with the circulation of the image, and that is something I neither know nor care about. I can only say that it is strange to me that a Henri Cartier-Bresson is cheaper than a Joel Peter Witkin. Perhaps it is a matter of dimensions, or a matter of fashion. Allow me to wish that what I love is not in fashion. After all, techniques, prints, and dimensions are structural elements of a photograph, and very important, but they should not overshadow and replace its essence. Otherwise, I believe the saying of the anonymous student of May '68 fits metaphorically: "Culture is like jam: the less you have, the more you spread it."
It has also been said that photography should reveal the national roots of the photographer. And this has been emphasized more by foreign analysts, who see Greece, in particular, as a historically and ethnographically charged space. However, I find it rather boring (and often suspicious) that a work of art betrays the national or racial origin of the artist. I hope that an artist is something more complex, which undoubtedly includes these as well. I do not know if the Greece I love appears in my photos. I do not even know if the Greece I love exists. It is a fact that has created problems for me in integrating into the social whole. I love the Greeks as family, but I also feel them as strangers, again as family. My practical identification with the place over the years, the ancient wisdom, the charm, the rigor, and the variety of nature, the virtues of hospitality, poetry, and folk nobility, now hidden in a few provincial islands, are they able to counterbalance the aesthetic and moral offenses that today's Greek identity and behavior reserve for us? And to what extent do I recognize myself in these conflicts? I believe, however, that my photos cannot but hide something of these. Along with all the other (fortunately varied) cultural elements that have composed my personality over the years. My photos, if I believe they are sincere, may show a part of this complexity, which I try simultaneously to detect and exploit. This book is neither a reckoning nor a beginning, but only a "period" in the continuous flow of this effort and my life.
Plato Rivellis