To play means to wage your stakes. It means putting the world into play, taking distance from it, putting it in parentheses. Or it means using the world, using reality to invent other parallel ones, which obey different, arbitrary rules, so much more definitive because they are arbitrary. Or it means reinventing ourselves, creating imaginary characters that play a different game in that parallel world compared to the other, compulsory and random game of life.
It means walking through Alice’s looking-glass.
One can play on one’s own, but even when doing so we are all usually driven by the need to transform and recreate reality and things. By straddling a stick, it becomes a warhorse. A doll represents a real baby girl, with which we can reproduce the love, seduction and even cruelty we need or which disturb us, in a kind of theatre.
But above all, one plays with other people, competing against them, either one-on-one or in teams, applying the shared rules within the world of play that appear more comprehensible and easier to apply than those in the real world, which often scare us.
To play means learning to live, to compete, or sometimes to refuse to play along. It even teaches us how to pretend, to cheat.
When we think of play, the most common image that comes to mind is of children. But deep down we know we never stop playing, whatever our age, and more often than not, we must actually live life itself as though it were a game in order to survive. Although in the real world, one can never really recover the total absorption and seriousness of a child at play.
This seriousness operates on both a profound and a superficial level, enabling the masked riders to suddenly interrupt their great adventure and run for tea if mum calls.
Sometimes adults become pathological prisoners and victims of the risks of their games and they cannot find a way out.
For a photographer, what does it mean to photograph play?
In reality, you actually cannot photograph play, just as you cannot photograph love: you can only take pictures of lovers. So, you can only show people at play.
Photography itself can be a game, which has usually been the case for me, luckily.
When choosing this series of pictures taken over time, a reporter like myself reacts to situations and forms, which, in one way or another recount and evoke what life’s experience has deposited in our conscious imagination, especially during childhood.
In the few, or perhaps too many photographs chosen for this book, I seem to recognise the act of taking pictures of people at play as a possibly nostalgic desire to rediscover that paradise – which can also be a hell – of existential abandonment to what one is doing, that total absorption in the present in which one is living.
EXHIBITION
At Play
Ferdinando Scianna
From May 30th to July 3rd, 2016
Sale Affrescate
Palazzo Comunale
Piazza Del Duomo
51100 Pistoia
Italy
