Cristo si è fermato a Eboli - Masters of Landscapes

...opere fotografiche che esploravano una geografia meridionale dei luoghi e degli spazi di feste e rituali religiosi, un sincretismo di cerimonie cristiane e pagane.

THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS
PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER HALF OF ITALY 5/5

Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio

Enzo Sellerio, the first contemporary Sicilian photographer to gain an international reputation, explored a Sicilian landscape devoid of romantic rhetoric. Sellerio began photographing in the early fifties, producing images in which he tried to overcome the stereotyped picture of the South, and the conventional desolate representations of southern daily life. His excursions into the poorest areas of downtown Palermo reveal a certain Sicilian esprit, a peculiar instinct or will to go through everyday life armed with irony, a self-imposed distance. His most famous photographs, taken from the early fifties to the mid-seventies, were later published in 1977 in his Inventario Siciliano (Sicilian inventory). Commenting on Sellerio’s photographs, Leonardo Sciascia states: “The specific human reality that was spotted, pursued, and finally surprised by Sellerio, as in a strenuous and laborious hunt, presents an alert and stubborn resistance, made of superstition and shame, a resistance to yielding to a photographic eye and above all to being caught while signifying. . . . These photographs are thus in a way ‘forms’ of a life almost un-graspable and refractory in itself. They narrate and signify Sicily with truth and fantasy (as there is no truth without fantasy) and they belong to the best literary and figurative tradition of the island.”

Ferdinando Scianna caught the attention of the photography world in Europe in 1965 with his book Feste religiose in Sicilia. It included some hundred images, which the photographer took during a sort of pilgrimage, following itineraries for some years of religious processions in Sicily. Although these pictures are still often read as anthropological documentation of the studies by De Martino, they are, rather, an archaeological study of the habits and postures of Sicilians; they constitute an investigation into Sicilianness, what Scianna himself defines as “a sort of autobiography through representations of people and things that I love and hate the most.” Scianna’s Feste religiose is a tragic look into a Sicilian mode of existence that is carried out and perpetuated through a complex collection of everyday gestures, continuous rituals: a veritable enactment of a Pirandellian play of simulation and dissimulation.

At the beginning of the seventies, following in the wake of a renewed political commitment fueled by the students’ movement, the South was viewed and pictured as a locus of research and investigation into the folkloric, which seemed to revive memories of anthropological missions of the early fifties. By the mid-seventies, Marialba Russo was producing photographic works that explored a southern geography of the sites and spaces of religious festivals and rituals, a syncretism of Christian and pagan ceremonies. Some of her most successful photographs—such as those of men entangled in thorns, documents of mass self-flagellation, pictures of black-cloaked, thorn-crowned women—reflect on popular religious festivals as announcements of sexual repression. One of the most striking photographs taken during this period portrays a ritualistic enactment—by men—of the throes of labor, testifying to an ancient awe and fear of matriarchy.*

To Mimmo Jodice, the South is a project to revisit cityscapes and landscapes long subjected to the colonizing gaze of the tourist industry, and to map out a geography of sites/sights that pertain to a Mediterranean culture. Jodice reexplores the tradition of Neapolitan vedutismo (view painting), according to which the city of Naples, as a metonym for South from the Quattrocento onward, was represented as an open and transparent site, displayed for view, readily accessible and identifiable. While Jodice’s images openly challenge those conventional representations and genre pictures produced for Grand Tour travelers, they also disorient the viewer, presenting him/her with peopleless and labyrinthine and devoid of people. To Jodice, the South belongs to the vision of Mediterranean civilization—a place at the threshold of history and mythology, that space between form and hallucination. In his migrations throughout his Mediterranean, Jodice frames seascapes and coasts, bays and piers, archaeological sites set against wide open skies, endlessly tracing and retracing outlines and borders, working on an ever provisional travel map.

Text is here: https://archive.aperture.org/article/1993/3/3/the-invention-of-southernness

*Opening image: https://www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/fotografie/schede/IMM-3g010-0026927/

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzo_Sellerio

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinando_Scianna

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimmo_Jodice

https://www.postcart.com/catalogo/autore/119/marialba-russo 

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