The Pity of War - Romano Cagnoni

Watching the heavily edited and filtered images coming out of Syria at the moment, proved to be a sobering context for Romano Cagnoni's latest exhibition.   I've blogged about him before, when he had a small show in London, but this one is a big retrospective at the Palazzo Mediceo (the wonderful former home of the Medici family) in Seravezza.  Romano is probably Italy's greatest living photographer and has made his reputation  in war zones.  He specialised in going in under the radar and reaching the places the authorities didn't want anyone to see.

The result is a  narrative record of the terrible things that human beings do to each other.   His photographs of Biafra are brilliant, but too horrific for me to reproduce here.  He was also in Vietnam and in Croatia and Bosnia when Yugoslavia imploded.   His pictures of what was left of Vukovar are particularly shocking.

More recently he's been to Groszny to photograph the conflict in the Chechen Republic.

One of the most interesting things about the exhibition is Romano's commentary on what is, effectively, a record of his life.   Under a stunning black and white photo of a room full of men all sitting at separate tables in a bar, he writes that  'men's loneliness is linked with fear.  Men fear one another.'  And fear leads to war.

  
 And he sees the Chechen guerilla fighters as modern-day Greek heroes like Ulysses.

With his recent work he's been experimenting with a large format camera and huge colour prints that use landscape, colour and texture with the dexterity of a painter.  I'm afraid my poor little sony pot-shots can't even begin to convey the beauty of these photographs, or the size - the canvases above and below were both life-size.

As a writer, struggling with words, I do envy the amount of narrative that can be conveyed (without any translation) in a single image.  This is work of the highest possible calibre.  The exhibition lasts until 9th April.

Romano Cagnoni at Blacks Club, London

I’ve rarely been to a Gentleman’s Club, being the wrong gender for membership. Blacks has its own particular atmosphere - undulating wooden floors covered by woven Persian rugs, kilim covered sofas and cushions, foxed antique mirrors, dim lighting, small rooms you can squeeze half a dozen people into, gin and tonic drunk out of porcelain cups, poured from a Prohibition coffee pot. The entrance to the Private View was through the basement bar, crammed with men, drinking in a frankly pub ambience. A strange place for a feminist.

The reason for my visit is that one of Italy’s best photographers (we’re talking Italy’s equivalent of Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa here) is exhibiting at Blacks. Romano Cagnoni is one of that generation of photographers who covered the social revolutions of the sixties, the Vietnam war, Biafra and, more recently, the conflict in Croatia. He is one of those whose iconic images were seen by millions on the covers of Time, Life, Vogue, and Paris Match, without any of us knowing who exactly had clicked the shutter.

Two collections of black and white photographs are on the wall - images of London and Italy. There is a very young Mary Quant measuring a hem, a policeman arresting a barefoot girl wrapped in a sheet in Hyde Park, side by side with images of sheep in the ruins of a Tuscan hill village, and old women on church steps in Romano’s native Pietrasanta. One of his most striking images is the one above, of the Chelsea twins with their matching hats and frilly dresses.

By coincidence, I’ve just been reading Roland Barthes ‘Camera Lucida’, and that has made me think very hard about photographic images and how we read them. Barthes poses a number of philosophical questions about photographs - do they actually exist? Apparently not - without a subject there is no photograph, only a blank sheet of emulsion. So, of themselves, they don’t exist. And then there is what he calls the ‘punctum’ - a detail or section of the image not deliberately intended by the photographer (so not engineered), and probably different for everyone. It is the part of the image that makes the photograph sing for each of us individually.
For me, it was the black sole of the girl’s bare foot as she stood in a ballet pose, wrapped in a white sheet like a blonde angel on the tail gate of the Black Maria in Hyde Park. Or perhaps it was the no 19 bus passing by and caught in the upper segment of the photograph like a surreal score card.
But, having so recently come back from Asia, my favourite photograph has to be this one, which catches the precarious beauty of the region so perfectly.

Anyone interested in knowing more about Romano's work or viewing the exhibition should contact Sandra Higgins - sandra@sandrahiggins.com