Our attention was captured by the frames of amateur moviemakers contemporary with Luigi Ghirri.
These glances and the photographer’s shots have something in common. We’ve tried to isolate the images that bear witness to a closeness if not (im)possible identification.
The project, which grew out of historical reflection on the expansion of image production practices since the second half of the sixties, is an attempt to find correspondences between Ghirri’s photographic research and the proliferation of mass amateur images.
The challenge lay in recreating the Emilian photographer’s imagination (and everything pertaining thereto) of the first period by seeking it precisely in that humus and in that model from which his own artistic research originated. This work is an inquiry into how much amateur film archives in embryo may incorporate unconscious glances that are not so far from the transfiguration of reality carried out by photographers.
The insight therefore arises from coincidences and resemblances, incredible but only apparently random: some frames from home movies made prevalently in Emilia appear almost like unpublished professional shots, charged with a status full of ambiguity and at the same time stimulating.
What brings these frames close to photographic images is the historical, cultural and technological context of which they are part.
The verification which this project triggers is developed in twelve “photographs” from the same number of selected frames found among the thousands that comprise a reduced format cinematographic film. It is precisely in the choice of a frame corresponding to 1/16, 1/18 or 1/24 of a second, in this time interval, that something occurs which usually escapes the amateur moviemakers themselves.
Our intervention aims at narrowing the boundary between someone who films and someone who photographs, inasmuch as it applies the strictly photographic teachings of “seizing the moment” to a means of representation associated from its birth (Étienne-Jules Marey) with the idea of a “hail of shots”.
A selection process mediated by the National Archive of Home Movies from which all the images were drawn.
To render even more illusory the sensation of looking at photographs taken with a camera of the period we chose to have the photos obtained from the frames printed by the same printer who worked for Ghirri, Arrigo Ghi, who produced much of Italian photography in those years and therefore a very precise iconographic apparatus.
We asked him to intervene on the colours, as he would have done in the reference years for our archive research (1967-1976).
Ghi worked on the colours in full autonomy, having received instructions not to intervene on any signs on the film due to wear and tear or on the blurring that appeared from time to time.
Together with the grain of the film, these are the typical elements in home movie images which we didn’t want to alter, retaining them intact in the digital reproduction. Lastly, the technological nature of the process carried out in this project should not be neglected: in its presuppositions and in the results obtained it is a process of remediation of archive material which, as such and with due (and declared) devices, inevitably produces an effect of disorientation and, we hope, poses questions.