The power of the image has now overtaken the written word. In our society, a photographic report on a sensitive subject is worth more than a hundred articles. And magazines at all latitudes make an immoderate, shameless and perhaps excessive use of them. Thanks also to the influence of the web, photos have become an everyday habit. Everyone shoots, posts and talks, with disarming simplicity and tireless continuity. Unpretentious photos, photos of private events, a compendium of small personal stories are now available to millions of people, in an archipelago of impressions created by social networks. But above all, photography retains its dignity, its authentic nobility. This can be seen in the images of the greats of the past. The courageous experiments of Felix Nadar, the extraordinary discoveries of Louis Daguerre and in Italy, the Leopoldo brothers, Romualdo and Giuseppe Alinari, the legendary Giorgio Sommer. From their shots there is one great lesson. Photography, after all, is solitude. A dialogue, a challenge, a perverse duel between the photographer and the image. The image, which is ready to be put into focus, fixed and framed is still and motionless in front of the photographer. Nothing separating the two, just a simple diaphragm. I have never understood whether that shot captures a moment of life or an omen of death. Flipping through albums of the past, I see mass scenes of hundreds of people yellowed by time and waiting like old museum cars. Everything has disappeared, dissolved, vanished. It is not the effect of a bomb, but something more subtle. Time acts silently, day after day, according to an unknown but tenacious logic that does not call everyone back to the epilogue but thins them out with a daily and unpredictable rhythm. I find the photo shoots of the young actresses, capable of fixing a luxuriant blossoming beauty, almost by chance, in that admired woman, framed in those snapshots which stop in time and space. But the years will play their part. And they will inevitably develop a strangeness. What familiarity exists any longer with one's own image from 50 years ago? Who is that photographed person? It is someone else, an intruder, definitely a stranger. Strangers, mysteriously distant. As if youth was an unbound, disconnected experience, separate from one's own life, an obscure, indecipherable enigma, constructed with the colours of nothingness.
