La fotografia come “opera aperta” e specchio del sociale,

Next fall a Paolo Pellegrin’s Photos Exhibition will take place in MAXXI of Rome. Born in Rome in 1964 he is an Associated Magnum photojournalist since 2005. He works for “Newsweek” and “New York Times Magazine”. Pellegrin, known for his war reports, is considered one of the greatest and most sensitive photojournalist of our time: he has always moved on the ground of responsibility. His collections of war or catastrophe photos have a dominant motif: the misfortune it is never clear, almost always alluded to. Often they are a moment before or a moment after the event, like a frame taken from a movie that asks the observer to reconstruct the story and reflect on it. They are poetic transpositions of what remains after the tsunami, or after a bomb or after an earthquake. Pellegrin underlines the sadness: not to describe the catastrophe, but captures the emptiness that remains after, he photographs the melancholy, induces reflection. So in an interview: «I do not think I can change anyone's mind, and this is not the task that I feel ... the photographs enter a social circuit, full of information and emotions, they buy in their wander even a life, they can meet people and consciences and give birth to something. A photograph is not an ideology that overturns the minds, it is a seed: if you move something, it does so slowly, growing inside those who look at it. To this I still believe, I say as a photographer but also as a reader, because no photography really exists if it does not meet a conscience that welcomes and completes it ». The photo wants to "stop" the observer, it is "an open work" that does not provide univocal answers and leaves space for questioning. So its position is quite different from the one who fixes with the objective the moment of misfortune and makes the pain spectacular, certainly of great impact, but it does not make you think, it does not allow you to go further.

«Io non credo di potere cambiare la testa a nessuno, e non è questo il compito che mi sento addosso…le fotografie entrano in un circuito sociale, cariche di informazioni e di emozioni, acquistano nel loro vagare anche una vita propria, possono incontrare persone e coscienze e far nascere qualcosa. Una fotografia non è un'ideologia che stravolge le menti, è un seme: se sposta qualcosa lo fa piano, crescendo dentro chi la guarda. A questo credo ancora, lo dico da fotografo ma anche da lettore, perché nessuna fotografia esiste davvero se non incontra una coscienza che la accoglie e la completa». afferma in un’intervista Paolo Pellegrin, fotogiornalista della Magnum. La foto, quindi, vuole “fermare” l’osservatore, è “un’opera aperta” che non fornisce risposte univoche e lascia lo spazio per interrogarsi. Da qui parte una riflessione sull’opera di alcuni grandi fotografi dell’ultimo secolo: E. Atget, W. Evans, J. Meyerowitz, Gregory Crewdson, G. Basilico e W. Wenders.