Forms of documentation in contemporary photography by Laura Moro

Forms of documentation in contemporary photography
by Laura Moro
Corpi di reato (Bodies of Evidence) is a visual research project. It represents an act
of denunciation, but it is not limited to that. Rather it is an invitation to reconsideration,
to “confront the naked truth”. Only photography permits the capture, studied concentration
and contemplation of what exists, and of what definitely is now gone. More than any
analysis, account or summary, the photograph fixes a moment and presents us with an
incontrovertible fact: this is what we are. Certainly we are aware that computerisation of
digital photography in some way, perhaps in an ontological sense, alters what was the original
role of the photograph: above all to serve as document. However this is not what we wish
to explore here. This shift of recent years in various theoretical dimensions does not detract
in any way from the documentary work that many photographers still continue to conduct.
Much less from the Corpi di reato, that continue to testify to places that exist, but that we
no longer know how to see.
Alessandro Imbriaco and Tommaso Bonaventura are not witnesses of a reality caught
in the act: rather they are archaeologists. They excavate, bringing to light the objective,
material fact, outlining the stratum to which it belongs, documenting its connections to
various contexts. Bit by bit, exposure after exposure, the material fact thus takes on form
as an element of history.
Photography for documentation? The Corpi di reato project has no objection to this
definition. It does not attempt to distinguish itself by self-identification as artistry, as if
artistry were somehow in contradiction with documentary work. We are well aware that
documentation photography is no longer in style, and is seen simply as a relic of a society
that needed to classify phenomena in order to understand them. Now at the most we speak of
photography “in documentary style”, where objectivity is prevalently an expressive code and
documentation is not the final aim. Thus landscape photography too, will have had its day.
Yet I believe that if there is indeed an emergency in Italy today it is related to the
landscape and to capacities of elaborating a new concept of it, constantly with the idea
at heart that it is a part of cultural heritage, and that these are to be preserved together.
It is almost compulsory that we once more cite Luigi Ghirri, considered a master, and
thus no longer a man of dangerous opinions: “I believe that behind the environmental
disasters, apart from the mechanisms inherent in a certain type of development, man has
developed a disaffection in reference to his environment over the past 30 or 40 years, with
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a corresponding fundamental incapacity to relate with it through its depiction. Thus the
recovery of visual depiction, other than through written and ‘technical’ media, as instrument
for relation with the world, of rapport with the environment, can have great cultural weight
and effectiveness.” The consequences of the disconnection described are before us: the interest
on the part of certain photographers beginning in the 1980s – Ghirri first among others –
for “ordinary” places, has dispensed with the aestheticizing approach to reading the Italian
landscape, but has not succeeded in influencing the logic of government decision-making for
the territory. Thus the “Bel Paese” has become elitist and sham and the ordinary places ever
more untended and abandoned - with the further paradoxical aggravation of substituting the
dominant aesthetic of beauty with a dictatorship of non-beauty, thus making the perverted
processes of territorial use more acceptable.
I feel that the strength of the images in Corpi di reato is precisely this: the use of
photographic documentation methods (time/space units) to represent reality in its historicsocial dynamic. The photographs are a thesis on what our country is today, on what has
happened and where it has happened.
The exhibit, hosted by the Institute in its new exhibit space, is the first stage of a
reflection on the contemporary meaning of documentation photography. The ICCD, titular
to this great tradition of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, intends to
proceed with an examination of the many meanings that documentary photography has had
in Italy, beyond labels and intellectual associations. Corpi di reato offers us a point of
departure of high standard: it is a visual narration composed of documentary material which is exactly what our immense photographic archives have to offer.
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