Romanzo Meticcio

Davide Degano‘s Romanzo Meticcio begins with reproductions from a 1938 pamphlet or magazine. I don’t speak Italian, but many of the words are familiar enough even in their somewhat different spellings. Razza bears similarity to Rasse from German (race in English). Il principio della razza seems clear enough (the year is 1938 when Italy was under fascist rule), and I bastardi certainly is, especially given the range of photographs used to illustrate the idea.

And it keeps going this way for two more pages; I can’t help but move a little faster through these pages. It’s not that I can’t believe that almost 90 years ago this type of material was so widely believed and assimilated; it’s the fact that the Vice President of the country I live in essentially repeats it on a regular basis on TV.

Italy’s curse is that it occupies the territories from which the Roman Empire sprang many hundreds of years ago. It’s difficult to go anywhere there without stumbling upon some of its ruins.

I don’t know how many generations have passed since it crumbled into dust; but it’s probably exactly those many generations that allow for the idealization that we can now observe not just in Italy (some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley are very fond of that Empire even as it is obvious that they know very little about it).

Mussolini, the original fascist, built the foundation of his rule on his country’s distant and presumed glorious past. Never mind that the Romans were actually very liberal with their ideas of citizenship. A number of Roman emperors actually weren’t Italian. Trajan and Hadrian hailed from what is now Spain. Septimius Severus was born in Northern Africa and appeared to have had roots there. Marcus Julius Philippus is commonly known as Philip the Arab.

As one of the texts in the back of Romanzo Meticcio explains, Trajan, Hadrian, Septimus Severus, and Marcus Julius Philippus would have to apply for Italian citizenship if they lived today: “To this day,” Davide Valeri explains, “Italian citizenship is considered a right for those with the same blood, while it is a prize or a gift for all the others. Non-descendants of Italians have to earn it by proving how deserving they are to be accepted by Italian society.” (emphases in the original)

Up until fairly recently, the situation was exactly the same in the country I was born in, Germany. Many thousands of young people, born to so-called guest workers from Turkey and elsewhere, did not have German passports even though they had never lived in a another country. Based on what the texts in the book tell me, this is still the situation in Italy, meaning that many of the people in the photographs are finding themselves in this situation.

Race and citizenship ultimately are merely constructs to divide people, regardless of whether that division is ideological or bureaucratic (let’s not argue over whether you can have one without the other).

The inclusion of the historical text right at the beginning of Romanzo Meticcio is heavy handed. It’s likely that a viewer would have figured out what’s going on by looking at the photographs first, to then be told some of the background. Alas, we don’t live in times that ask for a more, let’s say, polite treatment of the matter.

Furthermore, the texts charges the photographs before the viewer has seen them. And it is exactly that fact that lends them such potency, in particular the many portraits of people, most of them young, who one suspects belong to the group that would have to prove that they’re “deserving […] to be accepted by Italian society”.

Romanzo Meticcio unfolds through a combination of photographs of Italy’s lived environment and portraits. We could have a discussion over whether all of the photographs of people are in fact portraits. But that would take us into the neutered photoland territory where ultimately nothing matters other than photographic dogma. So let’s not do that. If we define a photographic portrait as a picture that conveys something about a person’s spirit, we’re good.

Because that’s what this ultimately is all about — the book as much as the struggle we’re now witnessing in our collective sphere: is one person’s spirit of equal value as another person’s, regardless of how different the two people might be?

As far as I can tell, typically discussions start out from abstract concepts and then try to move to the people affected by them. However, it’s very much worthwhile to do it the other way around: to start from basic principles. Doing it this way places the burden of proof on the Italian government to justify why some people have to earn their right of citizenship even though they’re born in the exact same country as the others who don’t.

Romanzo Meticcio clearly is a book of and for our times. Unlike many other contemporary photobooks, in which their makers try very hard to avoid making an open statement, here it’s very clear. And it works not only because of Degano’s clear convictions but also because of the quality of the photographs.

The photographs are seductive and delicate, even when there is someone in a portrait who channels his inner Mussolini. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any illusions about people who vote for fascists. But I also know what denying another person’s humanity can lead to. Still, at any given moment, the focus cannot be on trying to understand fascist voters while so many other people are literally fearing for their lives.

Romanzo Meticcio was published with a relatively modest edition size — 300 copies, meaning (possibly) that you might have to act fast to get yours (assuming you want one). The book is a marvelous achievement by Davide Degano, a new addition to the Italian photography scene.

Recommended.

Romanzo Meticcio; photographs by Davide Degano; texts by Davide Degano, David Forgacs, Igiaba Scego, Davide Valeri; 160 pages; Artphilein; 2024

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Scenes of Absence

One of the challenges with words is that they will shade how you view photographs. While you can in fact use words with photographs, making them an integral part of the work, I think for the most parts words are being added to photographs after the fact, to serve as a statement to go alongside them or maybe as a slightly longer text to provide some context.

Depending on whether you see your photographs as the work or not — or maybe whether you want your audience to focus only on the photographs — a problem arises: the words might draw a lot of attention to themselves or to the story that they convey, a story that maybe would not reveal itself in quite this fashion in the pictures. Words, after all, function differently that pictures: they’re specific in ways that pictures are not.

On the other hand, it’s not clear whether an insistence on the primacy of photographs really helps to work with the full breadth of possibilities the medium has to offer. In part, that insistence on the primacy of photographs derives from the medium’s practitioners’ earliest attempts to establish their craft as, well, a form of art. Conventions were copied and adopted from other media (mostly painting) that undercut photography and vast parts of its potential.

In the end, if text has not been made an integral part of the work a photographic body of work still has to convey its intended purpose in a clear and self-contained fashion. However, even though many pieces of text added on later have as much utility as, say, a blurb a publisher might produce to sell a novel, there are cases where the text might add an essential part of the experience.

This certainly is the case for Touyama Yuhki‘s Scenes of Absence (頭山ゆう紀 — 残された風景; please note that I’m following the Japanese convention used on the book’s cover: family name followed by given name). If you were to ignore the text at the end, you would not only miss insight into how the work was made and what it alludes to. You would also miss one of the most heart-breaking pieces of text written by a photographer I’ve read in a while.

The text begins with the photographer’s grandmother announcing a cancer diagnosis that at age 92. Given her age and possibly also given the restrictions posed by the then ongoing Covid pandemic, the decision is being made not to pursue treatment. Instead, Touyama moves in with her grandmother and takes on the role as a home carer (at least initially supported through regular visits by a nurse and doctor).

Contrary to the initial assessment (“she has only three months at best”), the grandmother beats medical odds and survives for over a year. While taking care of her grandmother’s needs, Touyama takes photographs when she finds the time: the outside world seen from the inside or scenes encountered while being out on errands. As I suppose anyone can imagine, the long-term role of a caregiver is taking an increasing toll on her, though.

“My time as a caregiver had not gone well,” Touyama writes. The final three paragraphs of her text are absolutely heartbreaking. In it, the photographer voices her frustrations with relatives who abandoned her with the task at hand (“my father’s inability to take care of my grandmother because ‘men just can’t do that'”) and with herself (“I should have shown her more kindness”).

Once the grandmother has passed away, Touyama Yuhki is left to live with, in her own words, “endless regret and questions. Although I read lots of articles and books on caregiving, in actual practice I couldn’t keep up with what I learned.” The photographs are almost entirely devoid of her inner turmoil; and it is precisely this fact that makes the combination of the text and the photographs so poignant.

After reading the text, I found myself looking through the book time and again, trying to pinpoint some of what I had read in a photograph. Was there a way to see a sign of frustration, of trying to make her grandmother’s time more bearable? In the end, I am convinced that what I saw I only saw because I either wanted to see it or because I imagined that were I in this particular position I would maybe take such a photograph.

But that’s merely what words will do: they will affect us to see photographs in a specific fashion. It’s important not to lose sight of what matters, though: the first and foremost task at hand is to acknowledge the photographer’s hurt. Then, and only then, can one move on to imagining being in her place.

Scenes of Absence might appear to be a specific book about a specific situation (a Japanese woman taking care of her dying grandmother), but it’s really not. Caregiving is a task performed all over the world. All over the world it is gendered, whether it’s taking care of young children or of dying relatives. That father who decreed that “men just can’t do that” could be almost any man, even if the verbiage, of course, might vary. More often than not it falls on women to do the caring.

Seen that way, the absence in the title of the book also points at a larger absence in our societies: An almost complete absence of meaningful conversations around the duty of taking care of someone.

“It’s fine,” Ishiuchi Miyako, the grand dame of Japanese photography, says in a long conversation with Touyama Yuhki (I’m quoting from the machine translation; there is a short video with English subtitles that you want to watch), “as long as you keep taking pictures and don’t give up,” referring to photography’s ability to give solace to those who are in need of it. While Ishiuchi’s words specifically refer to a photographers, I think they extend outwards to viewers as well.

Things will be fine, we might conclude about any of the topics portrayed through photographs, as long as you keep looking at picture and don’t give up on looking the world, understanding what it ails, and on then making it a better place.

Recommended.

Scenes of Absence; photographs and text by Touyama Yuhki; 176 pages; Akaaka Art Publishing; 2024

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District

“The photos took place in Kyiv before the full-scale invasion.” The weight of these words, a few pages after the final photograph in Vladyslav Andrievsky‘s District, are hard to assess for anyone not living in Ukraine, anyone not experiencing the daily threat of being torn to pieces by russian missiles, drones, or bombs.

To what extent my knowledge of the war influences my read of the book I can’t tell. Am I reading too much into these photographs taken from 2017 until 2022 when I claim that there is a pervasive feel of dread, of something not entirely benevolent that might happen at any moment?

Perhaps.

And yet, I maintain that what I see is real. I could pinpoint it in the photographs and their interplay, which, given the way visual books work, would be a lot easier to demonstrate by showing it in person than by writing about it.

Alas…

It feels flippant to compare attempting to find one’s footing as a young person with living in a country at war, even as youthful drama often yields the kinds of exaggerated situations that life under bombs will bring naturally.

But bombs might bring death while the drama of youth only brings disappointment — and maybe some hurt.

At its core, District centers on growing up among the large multi-story apartment buildings that are so pervasive in those regions of Europe that previously were under Soviet rule/occupation. Mass produced and cheaply built after World War 2, they served an immediate need for housing, and at least initially, they brought forms of comfort to places that had not had them before.

With time, however, their increasing dilapidation not only served as a metaphor for the system that had created them, it also brought daily misery to those forced to live inside them.

And their anonymity stood in the way of what young people strive for the most: a sense of belonging to a unique community, a sense of feeling seen (while not being seen too much).

District is filled with depictions of those buildings and their surfaces. It’s difficult not to imagine being among them on a cold day, with the wind howling and diversions being absent.

Seen that way, the book’s story (if we want to use that word) is one that is experienced all over the world and that could have been told anywhere.

I’m writing this not to diminish Andrievsky’s book in any way. Instead, and this is important to note a few days after the current US president and his lackeys betrayed Ukraine, we need to see the people living there in the same way we see our neighbours across the street: as human beings who are just as deserving of safety, protection, and our care as we are.

Their stories, in other words, are our stories as well, even if the details might differ. That young people growing up in banlieue (to use the French term that seems most well suited to describe what I’m after) all face the same struggle is worthwhile mentioning; of course, it’s only the ones in Ukraine (or Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere) who also live under the threat of death arriving anonymously from the skies.

District breaks with the conventions of telling such a story through its inclusion of a very smart detail. The bulk of the photographs are in black and white. But there is a small number of colour pictures: a view of the sky, with the sun coming out behind an impossibly dark cloud. The pictures appear to have been taken moments apart, and there is more and more sun.

More and more sun. It’s not clear whether the hooded figure who in the first photograph gazes towards apartment towers in the distance will notice it. But in the final picture in the book, his head has turned, and there are traces of a face to be seen.

District shows a gifted photographer at work, one of a number of young Ukrainians who now are slowly becoming more well known outside of their home country.

It’s a brooding book for all the reasons I outlined above, but who am I to tell a young person not to brood? (Especially since I’m still spending so much time brooding myself.)

Recommended.

Слава Україні!

District; photographs by Vladyslav Andrievsky; essay by Olha Pavlenko; 100 pages; Syntax contact; 2024

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