A Stronger America.

Text by Andrea L. Casiraghi for DDE – Design Diffusion Editions

I've never understood America, I've never stopped to look at it as one should do when speaking about an unknown country which is famous just thanks to the media and some stories the world nowadays tell us. America, the far and old America of Walker Evans or William Klein, is a continent I didn't feel to interpretate, I saw it too distant and the marks of contemporaneity have always created a "cold idea" for a world that I sometimes considered as the ingenious developing of progress and the most glaring appearance of the annihilation of human personality. The America of the above photographers was surreally different, it was another America, it was a little damned, but far as far as history and moods are concerned. Maybe too far to be interpreted nowadays. I've never understood America, I've never actually seen it. The images can be understood and seen, the aesthetics can be enjoyed, but the primary essence of a place is something you have to perceive, it is something which must take you by hand and make you think and feel the moods of foreign places. Near or far, hectic and not, I've understood this America, the one captured in these photos, in a more impartial way. I don't know what precisely stroke me of these photos, but I'm sure about one thing: they have offered me the possibility to think. I've seen America in its daily life, in its details, in working moments with a human connotation, with something wonderful. An America which is alive and well beyond those frenzies transmitted by the media. A minimum "journey" discovering really-too-known or absolutely unfamiliar particulars. I think these photos are the symbols of the picture I always got of the concept of reportage. Document or not, representation or not, these photos portrait the everyday life in a minimalist realism and let the human being become the protagonist of himself, they enter daily moments that, although well-known because they always existed and still exist, are not so frequently remembered nowadays. They extrapolate the human manual skill in a world infected by invasive technology and develop its gesture into almost sacred moments. In these photos, America is closer to the old world, less unachievable and more men sized, more true and less formal. This is exactly what I thought when Alfredo Bini showed me this work. Beyond his technique and his undoubted formal ability, the elements which most stoke me are the flavours. Lights and shadows of often hidden people, visibility given to sought details, indescribable taste for human life in its flowing between the lines, in the streets, in the alleys, on the sea.