Author: Alberto Damian
Language: Bilingual Italian and English
Format: Hardcover, 21x18cm, 144 pages
ISBN: 978-88-31403-03-0
This book, or rather this diary, contains an image captured in a portion of strangeness, the shooting of people on the move, inactive and disconnected bodies and faces, slipped along a road, whispering silences proper to going, of the relationship between the body that moves and the role of the street; be it symbolic or simulated. A threshold or rather a sort of interzone through which the body is the protagonist of the case as an invisible engine of the intertwining of our lives and the evocative power of the image, capable of triggering snapshots of the imagination. Alberto Damian, through his photographic lens, seems to want to discover an exact coordinate as an observation point, choosing to let himself go, ignoring the degree of north latitude or that of west longitude in which he is trapped. His 'looking', in this adventure, is looking at faces and people and people who do not look, looks and films people who pass by, from a single place, a single fraction of time, and looks without being looked at. He sees without being seen. What he proposes, therefore, is a sort of 'theft': he resumes the defenseless exposure and without the possibility of posing by those who pass.
"When everything called Art was full of rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousand candles of his lamp, and the sensitive paper gradually absorbed the black cut out of some common use object. He had invented the strength of a tender fresh lightning bolt that outweighed all the constellations destined for our visual pleasures. "
Tristan Tzara
The photographs in this book were taken in New York between 12:44 am and 12:59 pm on September 28, 2017, on the sidewalk of 551 Madison Avenue. I photographed almost all the people who, in those 15 minutes, passed quickly between me - who was half a meter from the curb - and the building, except for those who passed while I changed the camera battery. The book collects practically all the shots taken, in their original chronological sequence.