FRANCO VACCARI
‘In palmo di mano’
Palazzo dei Pio, Carpi
15.12.2012 – 27.01.2013
Franco Vaccari’s conception of photography is indifferent to matters of technique, image quality, and formal balance. Instead, he is interested in disclosing the evocative power of each frame, a power which is revealed only after poring over its most secrets details. As an artist, he has always been committed to the management of perception in order to dig up the layers of meaning buried under the surface of every photograph. For Vaccari, the image is a field to be conquered. Aimed at grasping with clarity the sense of time hidden in details, his signature style entails using photography as an instrument of vision almost as if it was an extension of his sensory apparatus. Then, like an ethnographer, the artist engages in field research and delves into an expanded cultural field usually ascribed to anthropological disciplines. As the present publication shows, Vaccari is able to track down the typical features of a community by attentively searching archival images.
[ … ] In his latest work, realized specifically for this publication, Vaccari appropriates photographs well-known to the local community and recast them in a new light. Along this journey into the images, he singles out some details that, despite their being visible, remain somewhat out of sight. His technique is simple and sophisticated at the same time: his own personal taste notwithstanding, he blows details up according to the demands of the image because he is driven by the urgency to bring to the surface latent information that lay inside the photograph and wait to see the light. Then, although these pictures had already been shown in the context of history exhibitions and publications, here they are presented with a new angle and reveal a truth that goes beyond the mere record of an action or an event.
Vaccari is not so much interested in historic period costumes as in women’s anthropological development from the original freedom they enjoyed up until the 1930s and 40s, especially in the time off work, to the restraint and rigor of the 1950s when industrialization caged in the primitive energy that used to fuel production. On the contrary, economic development could provide Carpi’s women with a new role due to the fact they had already been hardened to toil in decades of working away from home as thousands of rice weeders had to do to reach the fields in Piemonte or making straw hats in their own dwellings. Their hands, ingeniousness, and creativity can now be applied to the knitwear clothing industries, the city’s latest pride and source of wealth, which indeed are often named after their women founders. Carpi’s situation turns out to be a unique case in the Italian industrial scene, a city where women are known to work harder than men. Then, it does not come as a surprise that, on occasion of this publication, Franco Vaccari selected the photographic series of men proudly holding their young female offspring “in the palm of the hand.”
Luca Panaro, Empowering vision, from the exhibition catalogue APM Edizioni.
© Franco Vaccari