Saturday 15 October, 18:00, we are pleased to inaugurate the personal exhibition of the photographer Giacomo De Carolis.
The exhibition, entitled “Camera chiara – Camera oscura” – on calendar of this Art Gallery until next 30 October – is curated by Tamara Detti and Giuseppe Sanfilippo and is dedicated to a series of black and white shots exclusively taken using historical film cameras and personally developed and printed in the dark room by the author.
LIGHT ROOM – DARK ROOM
“La camera obscure” (“the dark room”) is the photography physical principle: a black box from which a small hole lets a light beam pass through which casts the image of what stands in front of it to the opposite side.
Real photography only comes when one is able to fix that image into a material support and it is possible to see it in broad daylight. The dark room becomes essentially a magic place within the walls of which the chemical process of development and fixing of the image onto paper comes to life.
The essential style – and the peculiar feature – of this exhibition is that Giacomo De Carolis lives these two principles – physical and chemical – in a direct way: not as simple means, but rather as the essence itself of photography- and of doing photography.
Consequently, a vision is born – naive and primordial in appearance only- which is able to amplify the strength of single emotions tried and tested throughout the whole creative process, and which then expands magically pervading the paper frames hanging from the Galleria walls.
It is as though all the unconscious, which earlier intimately existed just in dark rooms, were to finally explode in everybody’s eyes in the light room collecting the images in their grey tonality.
In conclusion, it is not important if the photographer is an artist, a witness, a collector of memories or a time illusionist, as indeed the only true and unquestionable essence of photography is nothing more and nothing less than research – and Giacomo De Carolis is obstinately of this train of thought.
Giuseppe Sanfilippo
