Paolo Pellegrin. Shout with Eyes
Posted on June 21 2019
Author Marco Belpoliti
Translated by Jennifer Cooper
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There is a verse by René Char in Fogli d’Ipnos that makes one think of contemporary photography, and in particular that of Paolo Pellegrin: "Only the eyes are still able to shout". Looking at the images that the Roman photographer took in Lesbos among the migrants, or in Gaza, in the refugee camps of the Middle East, in the countless war scenarios around us, in the American slums, one is led to think that Pellegrin wants to make our eyes shout. He doesn't do it by staging the destruction of bodies, the violence perpetuated on people in a continuous and perverse way, but by fixing stones, people on their backs, faces, clothes hanging, rolls of barbed wire, walls, sheets.
Contemporary photography, in particular that of photoreporters and war correspondents, had to face a problem that Susan Sontag had pointed out years ago: the ethical content of the photographs appears very fragile. Perhaps only by exposing the massacres, starting from the massacre of the massacres that of the Nazi concentration camps, or by displaying the horror, only in this way photography can reach and increase our moral sense. However Susan Sontag was peremptory in her essay collected in On Photography: “The limit of the photographic knowledge of the world is that, if it can spur consciences, it cannot be in the long run,a political or ethical knowledge. The knowledge achieved through photographs will always be a form of sentimentalism, cynical or humanistic ".
Contemporary photography, in particular that of photoreporters and war correspondents, had to face a problem that Susan Sontag had pointed out years ago: the ethical content of the photographs appears very fragile. Perhaps only by exposing the massacres, starting from the massacre of the massacres that of the Nazi concentration camps, or by displaying the horror, only in this way photography can reach and increase our moral sense. However Susan Sontag was peremptory in her essay collected in On Photography: “The limit of the photographic knowledge of the world is that, if it can spur consciences, it cannot be in the long run,a political or ethical knowledge. The knowledge achieved through photographs will always be a form of sentimentalism, cynical or humanistic ".
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The implicit thought of the American writer regards the aesthetic value of photography, its ability to mobilize, despite everything, beauty, and therefore to eliminate the ethical message that the image could or would convey. The problem arises in front of many of the images that we see daily in the newspapers, in magazines, on the web, or exhibited in galleries and museums.
Photography seems to have obscured our ability to look thanks to the excess of daily shots of mobile phones and digital machines. Aren't we no longer able to shout with our eyes? No, we are; however our eyes continue to scream. And this even after the image of little Alan lying on the beach of Bodrum on 2 September 2015, reiterated in millions of screens on social networks around the world.
So what exactly are the photographs of Paolo Pellegrin exhibited in this exhibition? They are descriptions of tragedies, of painful and mournful events: people that flee its war-ravaged homeland, others that rush into a strip of no-man's land, a man who fights for his freedom, other men and women who rebel, all realities that we know from a distance on the viewer of our computer or on the TV screen. Paolo Pellegrin makes his eyes scream through details, sudden visions, moments caught on the fly in unrepeatable, yet salient moments: something has already happened and continues to happen. He has taken the opposite path to that described by Susan Sontag: to be able to show what cannot be shown, he has recourse to beauty and art. He became an artist, where photography has historically lost its meaning of being a witness. This is why Pellegrin does not show , but rather let's us imagine.
Photography seems to have obscured our ability to look thanks to the excess of daily shots of mobile phones and digital machines. Aren't we no longer able to shout with our eyes? No, we are; however our eyes continue to scream. And this even after the image of little Alan lying on the beach of Bodrum on 2 September 2015, reiterated in millions of screens on social networks around the world.
So what exactly are the photographs of Paolo Pellegrin exhibited in this exhibition? They are descriptions of tragedies, of painful and mournful events: people that flee its war-ravaged homeland, others that rush into a strip of no-man's land, a man who fights for his freedom, other men and women who rebel, all realities that we know from a distance on the viewer of our computer or on the TV screen. Paolo Pellegrin makes his eyes scream through details, sudden visions, moments caught on the fly in unrepeatable, yet salient moments: something has already happened and continues to happen. He has taken the opposite path to that described by Susan Sontag: to be able to show what cannot be shown, he has recourse to beauty and art. He became an artist, where photography has historically lost its meaning of being a witness. This is why Pellegrin does not show , but rather let's us imagine.
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People fleeing Libya during clashes between rebels and pro-Gaddafi armed forces. Tunisia, 2011. © Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum Photos
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We know that the status of the testimony is very uncertain, both when it is entrusted to memory and the human voice, and when it is a snapshot taken at a specific time and place. Another writer, John Berger, warned us about the power of testimony of images: they can lie. The images, Berger wrote, need words to say what they want to say. Among Scilla of the beauty and Cariddi of the testimony, Pellegrin chose the path of imagination in these images on display in Pistoia - Italy. More than showing, these photographs make us imagine: they move our senses in the direction of a ghost that does not exist. They use what there is - the image of a group of men immersed in water around a boat near the shore - to make us imagine the journey of those who have arrived there crossing deserts, refugee camps, and procellent seas. Only the imagination can support everything that precedes and follows an image. Imagination moves empathy and compassion.
These images showed in Pistoia use beauty to make people imagine and think. What are those stones on the ground, the sheet metal reinforced by a wooden pole, the metal shield held by the open hand, the astonished face of a girl? They are images, in fact, of something that we do not see, but that we can imagine. In this Pellegrin makes use of our memory and imagination, he cites without showing all that we already know of the world, of life, of objects, of innumerable possible and impossible situations. It even makes use of our experience, however limited, fragmented and incomplete. He completes it, suggesting we imagine what those stones are for or what happened to that man seen from the back or to the faces of the men and women who crowd into a sprawled and anguished row on a Greek island. They are lived instants that refer to our experience and our imagination, where other images, sensations and thoughts have accumulated for some time. Beauty, as Caravaggio's paintings show us - the painful images that the painter transmitted to us with his painting - resides in something that transcends aesthetics in the strict sense, to project itself into another space, where the image lives of its own specific beauty.
These images showed in Pistoia use beauty to make people imagine and think. What are those stones on the ground, the sheet metal reinforced by a wooden pole, the metal shield held by the open hand, the astonished face of a girl? They are images, in fact, of something that we do not see, but that we can imagine. In this Pellegrin makes use of our memory and imagination, he cites without showing all that we already know of the world, of life, of objects, of innumerable possible and impossible situations. It even makes use of our experience, however limited, fragmented and incomplete. He completes it, suggesting we imagine what those stones are for or what happened to that man seen from the back or to the faces of the men and women who crowd into a sprawled and anguished row on a Greek island. They are lived instants that refer to our experience and our imagination, where other images, sensations and thoughts have accumulated for some time. Beauty, as Caravaggio's paintings show us - the painful images that the painter transmitted to us with his painting - resides in something that transcends aesthetics in the strict sense, to project itself into another space, where the image lives of its own specific beauty.
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This beach was animated by fishing boats and cafes, but the Israeli naval blockade, the sewage and the lack of resources for reconstruction have had disastrous consequences. Gaza, 2011. © Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum Photos.
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In this, Pellegrin bypassed Susan Sontag's objection precisely because he didn't try to mobilize our ethical sense, and at the same time did not bother to give us some beautiful images. He has given us rather incomplete, fragmentary images, taken from the flow of life to make us imagine what life is, what we have experienced and what we have only imagined. Our life is that of others, because it is always the others that we see depicted in these images, the others that we are, if only the life we could have lived had been the life of others, the others that we do not even know and who now we see only for a moment set in the frame of the photograph: "Only the eyes are still able to shout".
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© Paolo Pellegrin
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