…in the era of places without history, memory, or identity

…in the era of places without history, memory, or identity ⁽²⁾ – from airports to outlets, from motorway service areas to railway stations – we often find ourselves living as unaware wanderers in landscapes increasingly filled with emptiness. In this time that makes us citizens of the world without truly making us citizens of any place, we need a pause. A pause for the gaze, a pause for feeling and thinking.

The photographic “meditation” that Luca Bertone offers us through the images of some villages in the Vedeggio Valley, captured in their essence through objects, alleys, windows, and doorways, grants us the precious opportunity for such a pause. A pause that is also a momentary visual journey toward what we do not see, but which continues to exist and to which we seek to give new life.

A photographic narrative as an ethical gesture, even before an artistic one. If artistic work has value, it is because it creates soul, it becomes soul. Photographs in search of what Hillman calls the soul of places.

That places have a soul and that the task of the artistic gesture is to discover it and allow its rebirth is an ancient belief. Yet our world has increasingly hidden the interiority of places, anesthetizing our gaze, sometimes leaving us as exiles in “our own home,” exposed to the uncertainty of wandering for those who have lost their way.

Once, forests, crossroads, springs, and wells were inhabited by gods, nymphs, or daimones. Now all those figures of our inner world, figures also of the interiority of a community, have vanished. The secret signs of their ancient presence, which these photographs seek as if they were faint traces in a still unknown space, speak of another reality contrasted with the cold, functional “signage” of our hurried daily lives. But then, what do the photographs of those villages reveal and make visible, with their flavor of mystery and antiquity?

To truly see, the eye must sometimes close; at other times, it must simply look away, accepting for an instant to lose that concentration, that “light of reason” that separates, orders, and classifies everything, thus deceiving us into capturing and controlling reality, while instead hiding it. Photography is an image of what has already been. Here perhaps lies the melancholic atmosphere that pervades these photographs.

But here is also the joy of rediscovery. The loss and rediscovery of that lost soul, which perhaps continues to live exactly where we least expect it, of that soul we once felt even without truly seeing or describing it. It is as if it were a visual recording of what time has already erased in the meantime.

This is why these photographs are at once precious and sorrowful objects. They make visible the being-already-past, the being-already-happened, like a point of catastrophe of reality itself. But it is precisely here that the miracle is fulfilled, allowing us to move in the “not-yet-happened,” where everything is still possible. Photography as a “midwife” of a soul of places thought to be lost.

This is why photography, and especially the act of photographing, is a more tragic and risky gesture than other forms of art. The mystery they reveal resides entirely in the “punctum” described by Barthes, in the satori of Zen Buddhism, which is the experience of awakening at the very moment things are about to disappear. Here lies the “aura” of the gesture and the photographic image. Photography, indeed, leads the viewer into the place of wonder.

The photographer’s skill in capturing the essence of passing things lies not so much in showing us, but rather in witnessing through the image, as if it were proof, of already being there when things happen. Where something is born, where something already dies in the frame of the film, becoming a trace and a sign. In this incessant movement between loss and rediscovery, between what has already been and what has not yet happened, dwells the rediscovered soul of these places of ours.