“In the same way I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love.”
Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida. Reflections on photography -1980
The Ritratti di famiglia – Family Portraits project is the result of a series of aesthetic choices finalized to a specific symbolic content.
The pictures represent a playful greeting from the people I love the most from a faraway dimension. The people portraits using a double exposure on a single frame realized directly in the moment of the shutter click (and not in post-production/darkroom) all belong to my most intimate sphere - dear friends, close and very close family members such as my daughters, my husband, and my father.
This photographic sequence reflects on the awareness, present also during the happiest moments of my life, that one day all of them will cease to exist. It represents therefore my personal attempt of recognizing time, of dealing with the fear given by this awareness.
These pictures, like a sort of “dress rehearsal”, force me to an imaginary confrontation with the inevitable eventual absence of my beloved ones. The figures, sometimes almost unrecognizable, represent the image that I could have of them in my memories to come. The recollection of my dear ones takes distance from a simple representation and describes the sense of loss and absence, giving back portraits with uncertain profiles and frequently estranged features.
The decision of shooting the double exposure directly on a single frame is not a mere formal choice, but a metaphor of our condition as human beings at the mercy of life’s events. Not being able to fully control the final result of a photo makes every single frame an “individual” with a unique and unpredictable existential path.
Representative of such choice are the so called “dark stripes”, present in all those photos where the two shots were not perfectly congruent. The stripes, by sometimes revealing evocative details, other times appearing as simple geometrical figures inside the picture frame, tell of our vulnerability and the perception of chance driving our existence.
Gaia Adducchio
“Family Portraits (Rullino 17 - Foto 36A)”
“Family Portraits (Rullino 4 - Foto 34A)”
