One of the most influential photographers of the last century was moved by a Pasolinian desire to redeem the “last”. In his work, which in the first journalistic evening, art came second
It was one of the great photographers of Panoramain the years in which it was the most modern Italian magazine. But it was also a great photographer of L’Espresso, the world, of the communist rotocalcs in which he started his career (new streets, we women), and abroad of Life, Sunday Magazine, Paris Match. He was then trusted photographer of Federico Fellini, with whom he establishes a very special partnership. In a year of centenarians of the birth of some masters of Italian photography such as Mario Giacomelli and Tazio Secchiaroli, there is also that of Franco Pinna (La Maddalena 1925 – Rome 1978), whose celebrations for the anniversary open with the exhibition SERIDioni, wanted by the Pio Alfarano and Virginia Ippolito Foundation (Castellabate/Sa, Castello dell’Abate, scientific direction of the Franco Pinna archive, up to 26, September). Why does the centenary start from Cilento and not from Sardinia, a native of Pinna to which he dedicated his most heartfelt photographic production? Because the Sardinians have more possibilities when they live outside the island. In the face of the renotence of the public institutions to take charge of the commitment, it was the Sardinian Santino Carta, president of the Alferano Foundation, who heard almost the moral obligation to do what the correctives did not do. But the Sardinians, at least those of the best, will have the opportunity to make up if it is true that the next autumn and summer will remember Pinna with other initiatives.
Pinna, therefore, of the same age of Giacomelli and Secchiaroli. With the second there was a great friendship, which started from the memorable circumstance in which the two, united by similar political passions, found themselves, as in an artistic performance, taken up each other while fleeing motorcycles to avoid the reaction of the Celerini (Rome, via del Tritone, 1952), and the sharing of the same profession, the photojournalist who works in the context of information. Giacomelli, on the other hand, belongs to another side, the non -professional amateur one, who was concerned about first of all that he recognizes the photography the rank of art in all respects. Not that people like Pinna were devoid of aesthetic scruples.
In his beginnings, carried out in contact with other young people of beautiful hopes such as Caio Garrubba, Nicola Sansone, Pablo Volta, Plinio de Martiis who will then become the greatest gallery owner of Rome, the knowledge of Images à la Sauvette by Henry Cartier-Bresson play a decisive role, the photographic photographic photographic for art, the instant décixif. The ability to grasp in the things of life what the eye alone would not be able to do.
The influence of the great photographers of the legendary Life magazine, Eugene Smith above all, is also decisive. Pinna does not seek art as Giacomelli, who looks more to painting, incision, poetry. Look for information that art can be, given that it is rendered through expressive language, a possible consequence. To make art it happens very often, from his first tests. The Castellabate exhibition focuses on the most important subject treated by Pinna in the initial and more career ten years (1952-1963), the various faces of a southern Italy that several intellectuals of a certain address decide at that moment to rediscover, after twenty years in which fascism had substantially denied its discomfort. The main between these intellectuals is Ernesto De Martino, the greatest Italian anthropologist of the last century, who has been carrying a pinna since 1952 in the province of Matera, wanting to know a popular culture that remained incredibly archaic in which the magic and the rite took on a remarkable weight in avoiding what the scholar calls “presence crisis”, the existential sense of disorientation that the primordial man warns Great threats of fate such as misfortune, disease, death. Pinna will also follow De Martino on other occasions, in particular in 1956 along the province of Potenza and in 1959 in an epic expedition that in Salento brings to light the residues of tarantism, the exorcistic practices with which we freed ourselves from the malignant influence of the bite of a spider, actually pretext to simulate a madness in which all its inner malaise was poured out. The relationship between the two will end (Pinna is not mentioned in the first edition of La Terra del Remorse, the essay by De Martino dedicated to Tarantism), but the photographer owes a lot to the experiences of life, eye and mind that have put him in contact with the most secluded and forgotten people of the South, a world that remained behind in time, with its obligations, its mentality, its faces different from those of the cities, reconstruction as it was at that moment.
A world for which Pinna immediately warns a transport comparable to that of Pier Paolo Pasolini, as if misery and backwardness preserved romantically from the corruption of the modern world. It is this respect, combined with the awareness of being an archaeologist of an ancient humanity intended for sure disappearance, which induces Pinna to transform a dwarf into giants that enjoyed the fame of jokes and a prescription of Pisticci in Colossi who after having cried puts himself to mitigate (1952), or a farmer who masks himself as a diet in a very singular pagan rite of dispenser (San Giorgio (San Giorgio Lucano, 1959). Photography, supported Pinna, is a means of giving face to the history of people, the experience that neorealistically becomes flesh. As in the exemplary case of that young wife of fisherman in Bagnara Calabra (1953), close to her baby, who has no longer seen her husband return from the sea, but still awaits him. Pinna believes in photography as a form of denunciation, would like to move consciences, but moves when it reserves attention to women and children, the most vulnerable points also of the archaic societies of which it is extreme witness, which are recurring victims of the exploitation of the work (the collectors of Olive, 1957, and of Gelsomini, 1963, in Calabria). The work, to which a section of the exhibition is dedicated (the others are people, rituals and mourning), is the measure of the level of a civilization, but man does not always ennoble, if anything, man is the one who ennobles him when he recognizes himself, even in the propagations that announce the advent in the same way desirable and fearsome of industrialization (the construction site workers in Palermo, 1963). And then there is Sardinia, which for Pinna is a separate discussion, the personal research of an identity with a people left too early that confides in the pride of traditions, in the continuation of a human model, with a hard and generous zest, which glimpses above all in Barbagia.
A sore and lost south, if it were only problems such as the exploitation of work are still on the agenda. And then the emotion becomes indignation.
