1) Tell us first about your approach to photography?
How do I define my approach? Is that of a reporter? Or is it “conceptual”? The obvious answer is that the problem should not arise. These classic dilemmas of reporting, to whom I owe my short education, are not current anymore. But this is not the fault of the photo journalists. Many artists shudder at the word report forgetting that – regardless of photo contest classifications and festival posters – report also means return, refer in fact, all of which are in the nature of photography. Because photography remains a medium of compromise with reality of which it bears the burden. Insist on these categories leads to the dangerous conclusion that we should describe reality only with constructed images, and that artists can not be documentary otherwise they do photo journalism. Or, worse, that the distinction is of an aesthetic nature, and that, for example, the report is identified by the framing “a bit twist” and by the coolest post-production of the moment. These themes are present in my works.
2) In Waiting Room it seems you are looking more “slowly” than in other series?
Waiting Room is a work carried out in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in the Moroccan territory, a border place. I was actually there with a colleague to do a diametrically opposite job called Mare Nostrum, a sociological research that sought a maximum objectivity without interfering with our views. Our documentary approach, almost cataloging, lead us to create portrait sets. The thing that made me think was that in order to get an objective result we used a medium which involved a massive intervention upon the subject in this situation, and we were certainly not the first to do it so (there are so many photographers after August Sander or E. J. Bellocq). So I decided to work on Waiting Room in a different way. I wanted to tell Ceuta’s condition of suspension or duality, and of borders in general, with a narration totally subjective, a bit fictionalized, yet without intervention on the scene. So I wanted to represent a personal concept about places, using only “stolen” pictures. To be clear, Ceuta is not really like Waiting Room and people of Ceuta do not wander as a ghosts all day long on lonely moors. The images themselves present a mendacious version but not “constructed”. The condition of suspension of border places is real, but basically this is my opinion.
3) Some of your projects are working in opposition to the stereotypical views of places. An attempt to raise awareness in the reading of the landscape…
Interno Giorno (“L’affaire Matterhorn” on my blog) is a work that took place in a workshop related to the Mountain Photo Festival. The photographs were made at Cervinia, another city that, like Ceuta, is interesting for its bipolarity. Among the largest ski area in the Alps, it heavily suffers from alternating seasons. It is bleak for most of the year but reaches very high density during the holidays and the various winter holidays. The title, borrowed from the film argon, betrays the intent to express this duality in terms of the relationship between reality and fiction. The places depicted are almost exclusively related to tourism: the interior of the ski slopes, hotel lobbies or entrances of restaurants and, again, waiting rooms. All places specially designed to operate a few days a year. It’s my intentinon to use this pretext to argue whether it is economically possible, in the name of economic exploitation of the landscape, to conceive an entire urban stratification disconnected from the real needs of the community. That a whole town will rest on the gains of a few weeks a year. Or the disproportion between the power of money and of the community that masochistically suffers and takes advantage of it. Here the reality is empty and the fiction of a few days maintains the emptiness of the rest of the year. I hope that these emptied places will make people think about their real usefulness.
4) The project Masserie concerned again with tourism, this time in your land. How did you address the changes that are affecting your land?
The images from Masserie are also related to tourism. It’s a series still in progress on traditional manor farms in the region of Apulia (Puglia), in Italy. The work was published as Cartoline dalle Puglie, which used the postcard to represent an investigation carried out by a collective of local young authors on their native land. Here again the intention is to stimulate in the observer a critical view through the fiction, in this case strongly forced. The farms usually have nothing to do with the minimalist Scandinavian furniture, nor with plasma displays. And people neither are nor act like the inhabitants of these places. The social problem that interests me here is the process of transformation that the farms are suffering – from the centers of agricultural production system to five-star hotels or luxury resorts –, and their adaptation to certain high standards for the global tourism. I am not criticizing this, or hoping for some return to a rural dimension. However, neither do I want this change to go unnoticed, or rather, not documented. I think it is marginally less than might appear at first sight. A similar transformation is recorded in many Italian cities, where local governments are converting residual peripheral areas into urban gardens, another theme that interests me very much. There, the transformation is the concept of agriculture, from a system to produce food, to hobbies, leisure activities and perhaps even a therapeutic activity for the families living in the suburbs.
© All copyright remains with photographer Giuseppe Fanizza