This curious and innovative Italian photographer, whose constantly renewed output is beyond classification, is currently showing at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Part of the exhibition is devoted to an amazing series of photographs of walls.
Nino Migliori surprises all those who meet him, all those who wish to understand the meaning and scope of his work. Above all he surprises with his telluric production, by the diversity of his work, by the constant language differences that inspired his research.
While his purely documentary style is similar to that of the humanist photographers of the second half of the twentieth century, he also looked for new points of view, transforming the vision of the city with new perspectives and artistic settings. But through the years, the relationship between photography and reality also nourished something else: from a focus on the many ways of living in the now, looking for clues and evidence imbued with a freedom of expression to re-invent every day.
“Photographing”, Nino Migliori maintains, “means choosing and changing”. And as in alchemy, the chosen subject becomes something else. A fragment of memory for posterity. A question asked of contemporaries. A new path to follow; one of the many paths that Migliori has followed and will continue to follow in his never-ending search.
The series Walls, begun by Nino Migliori at the beginning of the 1950s, is the fruit not of Dubuffet’s own informal art but in the spirit of realist photography: the freedom to wander through the city without having to flee or hide, the rediscovery of a place where you can move, stop, contemplate, understand.
Deposited on the walls are the traces of existential change that the artist scrutinises, observes. The crumbling material, corroded by time is a real store of memory. It has to be caught, enthused about, without realist distractions.
The wall is like the open page of a collective journal onto which the first passer-by shouts his point of view, so that the second one can echo it in a dialogue both private and public. The wall is also a witness to man’s action: he scratches its surface, destroys it, cracks it open, degrades it and preserves it. Even after the 1950s, Migliori pursued his work with the walls. As if they were landscapes, these images spark off his observation, always paying attention to the city’s real skin – deep, sometimes scrawny: unwitting memorials, mirrors loaded with everyday life.
Alessandra Mauro
Alessandra Mauro is an Italian journalist, art critic and exhibition curator. She lives and works in Rome.
Nino Migliori, La matière des rêves
From 17th January to 25th February 2017
Maison Européenne de la Photographie
5/7 Rue de Fourcy
75004 Paris
France
