There, where silence reigns
Photography is my ‘zone’, where silence reigns, where time has stopped.
When I photograph I go beyond the barbed wire, the guards’ sentry box, the last light on the asphalt.
When I photograph I become a stalker, I enter without realising it, into the zone of alienation, like in a fever I follow desire, I scrutinise chance, life, destiny. I immerse myself in the mystery, and forget.
He looks into my face for the last time at all that I lose and walks away.
All the veils peel away, the ancient plasters, I finally see.
When I photograph it is as if I come back to life, the more I touch the ashes and the wind, and as I enter the darkness of the labyrinth and the depths of the swamp, a fire rises towards me, but I do not return, there is no more time.
I almost always realise, and I cannot say whether in the landscapes in which I lose myself, whether they are places or faces, figures, and, then, in the photographs, that I find myself facing, each time, something both familiar and unfamiliar, as if those places, those figures, those faces, had always been part of my deepest landscape, and at the same time, I see them for the first time, as dreamed places, unknown figures and faces. When this happens, I feel that a small miracle has taken place, I feel that this is a ‘good photograph’ that has managed to penetrate ‘a timeless time to infinitely develop the poetry of the gaze that is for me, form and sign of the unconscious’. Like a fatality, through a wound, that photograph painfully detaches itself from me and comes close and captures me, as in an inverse process to the camera shot, in the unfathomable mystery of its appearance.
Nella Tarantino
