Professionally, Antonino Paraggi occupied an executive position in the distribution department of a production firm, but his real passion was commenting to his friends on current events large and small, unraveling the thread of general reasons from the tangle of details; in short, by mental attitude, he was a philosopher, and he devoted all his thoroughness to grasping the significance of even the events most remote from his own experience. Now he felt that something in the essence of photographic man was eluding him, the secret appeal which made new adepts continue to join the ranks of the amateurs of the lens, some boasting of the progress of their technical and artistic skills, others, on the contrary, giving all the credit to the efficiency of the camera they had purchased, which was capable (according to them) of producing masterpieces even when operated by inept hands (as they declared their own to be, because wherever pride aimed at magnifying the virtues of mechanical devices, subjective talent accepted a proportionate humiliation). Antonino Paraggi understood that neither the one nor the other motive of satisfaction was decisive: the secret lay elsewhere.
It must be said that his examination of photography to discover the reasons of a private dissatisfaction – as of someone who feels excluded from something – was to a certain extent a trick Antonino played on himself, to avoid having to consider another, more evident process that was separating him from his friends. What was happening was this: his acquaintances, of his age, were all getting married, one after the other, starting families, while Antonino remained a bachelor. And yet between the two phenomena there was undoubtedly a connection, inasmuch as the passion for the lens often develops in a natural, virtually physiological way as a secondary effect of fatherhood. One of the first instincts of parents, after they have brought a child into the world, is to photograph it; and given the speed of growth, it becomes necessary to photograph the child often, because nothing is more fleeting and unmemorable than a six-month-old infant, soon deleted and replaced by one of eight months, and then one of a year; and all the perfection that, to the eyes of parents, a child of three may have reached cannot prevent its being destroyed by that of the four-year-old, the photograph album remaining the only place where all these fleeting perfections are saved and juxtaposed, each aspiring to an incomparable absoluteness of its own. In the passion of new parents for framing their offspring in the sights to reduce them to the immobility of black-and-white or a full-color slide, the non-photographer and non-procreator Antonino saw chiefly a phase in the race towards madness lurking in that black instrument. But his reflections on the iconography-family-madness nexus were summary and reticent: otherwise he would have realized that actually the person running the greatest risk was himself, the bachelor.
In the circle of Antonino’s friends, it was customary to spend the weekend out of town, in a group, following a tradition that for many of them dated back to their student days and that had been extended to include their girl-friends, then their wives and their children, as well as wet-nurses and governesses, and in some cases in-laws and new acquaintances of both sexes. But since the continuity of their habits, their getting together, had never lapsed, Antonino could pretend that nothing had changed with the passage of the years and that they were still the band of young men and girls of the old days, rather than a conglomerate of families in which he remained the only surviving bachelor.
More and more often, on those excursions to the sea or the mountains, when it came time for the family group or the multi-family picture, an outsider was asked to lend a hand, a passer-by perhaps, willing to press the button of the camera already focused and aimed in the desired direction. In these cases, Antonino couldn’t refuse his services: he would take the camera from the hands of a father or a mother, who would then run to assume his or her place in the second row, sticking his head forward between two heads or crouching among the little ones; and Antonino, concentrating all his strength in the finger destined for this use, would press. The first times, an awkward stiffening of his arm would make the lens veer to capture the masts of ships or the spires of steeples, or to decapitate grandparents, uncles and aunts. He was accused of doing this on purpose, reproached for a joke in poor taste. It wasn’t true: his intention was to lend the use of his finger as docile instrument of the collective wish, but also to exploit his temporary position of privilege to admonish both photographers and their subjects as to the significance of their actions. As soon as the pad of his finger reached the desired condition of detachment from the rest of his person and personality, he was free to communicate his theories in well-reasoned discourse, framing at the same time well-composed little groups. (A few accidental successes had sufficed to give him nonchalance and assurance with finders and light-meters.)
“. . . Because, once you’ve begun,” he would preach, “there is no reason why you should stop. The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. If you take a picture of Pierluca because he’s building a sand-castle, there is no reason not to take his picture while he’s crying because the castle has collapsed, and then while the nurse consoles him by helping him find a sea-shell in the sand. You only have to start saying of something: ‘Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!’ and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore in order really to live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second, to madness.”
“You’re the one who’s mad and stupid,” his friends would say to him, “and a pain in the ass, into the bargain.”
“For the person who wants to capture everything that passes before his eyes,” Antonino would explain, even if nobody was listening to him any more, “the only coherent way he can act is to snap at least one picture a minute, from the moment he opens his eyes in the morning to when he goes to sleep. This is the only way the rolls of exposed film will represent a faithful diary of our days, with nothing left out. If I were to start taking pictures, I’d see this thing through, even if it meant losing my mind. The rest of you, on the contrary, still insist on making a choice. What sort of choice? A choice in the idyllic sense, apologetic, consolatory, at peace with nature, the fatherland, the family. Your choice isn’t only photographic; it is a choice of life, which leads you to exclude dramatic conflicts, the knots of contradiction, the great tensions of will, passion, aversion. So you think you are saving yourselves from madness, but you are falling into mediocrity, into hebetude.”
A girl named Bice, someone’s ex-sister-in-law, and another named Lydia, someone else’s ex-secretary, asked him please to take a snapshot of them while they were playing ball among the waves. He consented, but since in the meanwhile he had worked out a theory against snapshots, he dutifully expressed it to the two friends:
“What drives you two girls to cut from the mobile continuum of your day these temporal slices, the thickness of a second? Tossing the ball back and forth, you are living in the present, but the moment the scansion of the frames is insinuated between your acts it is no longer the pleasure of the game that motivates you but rather that of seeing yourselves again in the future, of rediscovering yourselves in twenty years’ time, on a piece of yellowed paper (yellowed emotionally, even if modern printing procedures will preserve it unchanged). The taste for the spontaneous, natural, lifelike snapshot kills spontaneity, drives away the present. Photographed reality immediately takes on a nostalgic character, of joy fled on the wings of time, a commemorative character, even if the picture was taken day before yesterday. And the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself. To believe that the snapshot is more true than the posed portrait is a prejudice . . .”
So saying, Antonino darted aroun
d the two girls in the water, to focus the movements of their game and cut out of the picture the dazzling glints of the sun on the water. In a scuffle for the ball, Bice, flinging herself on the other girl, already submerged, was snapped with her behind in close-up, flying over the waves. Antonino, so as not to lose this angle, had flung himself back in the water, holding up the camera and nearly drowning.
“They all came out well; and this one’s stupendous,” they commented a few days later, snatching the proofs from each other. They had arranged to meet at the photographer’s shop. “You’re good; you must take some more of us.”
Antonino had reached the conclusion that it was necessary to return to posed subjects, in attitudes denoting their social position and their character, as in the nineteenth century. His anti-photographic polemic could be fought only from within the black box, setting one kind of photography against another.
“I’d like to have one of those old box cameras,” he said to his girl-friends, “the kind you put on a tripod. Do you think one could still be found?”
“Hm, maybe at some junk-shop . . .”
“Let’s go see.”
The girls found it amusing to hunt for this curious object; together they ransacked flea-markets, interrogated old street-photographers, followed them to their lairs. In those cemeteries of objects no longer serviceable, lay wooden columns, screens, backdrops with faded landscapes; everything that suggested an old-fashioned photographer’s studio, Antonino bought. In the end he managed to get hold of a box camera, with a bulb to squeeze. It seemed in perfect working order. Antonino also bought an assortment of plates. With the girls helping him, in a room of his apartment, he set up the studio, all fitted out with old-fashioned equipment, except for two modern spotlights.
Now he was content. “This is where to start,” he explained to the girls. “In the way our grandparents assumed a pose, in the convention that decided how groups were to be arranged, there was a social meaning, a custom, a taste, a culture. An official photograph or one of a marriage or a family or a school group conveyed to what extent each role or institution was serious and important but also how far they were false or forced, authoritarian, hierarchical. This is the point: to make explicit the relationship with the world that each of us bears within himself, and which today we tend to hide, to make unconscious, believing that in this way it disappears, whereas . . .”
“Who do you want to have pose for you?”
“You two come tomorrow and I’ll begin by taking some pictures of you in the way I mean.”
“Say, what’s in the back of your mind?” Lydia asked, suddenly suspicious. Now, as the studio was all set up, she saw that everything about it had a sinister, threatening air. “If you think we’re going to come and be your models, you’re dreaming!”
Bice giggled with her, but the next day she came back to Antonino’s apartment, alone.
She was wearing a white linen dress with colored embroidery on the hems of the sleeves and pockets. Her hair was parted and gathered over her temples. She laughed, somewhat slyly, bending her head to one side. As he let her in, Antonino studied her ways, a bit coy, a bit ironic, to discover what were the traits that defined her true character.
He made her sit in a big armchair, and stuck his head under the black cloth that complemented his camera. It was one of those boxes whose rear wall was of glass, where the image is reflected as if already on the plate, ghostly, a bit milky, deprived of every link with space and time. To Antonino it was as if he had never seen Bice before. She had a docility, in her somewhat heavy way of lowering her eyelids, of stretching her neck forward, that promised something hidden, as her smile seemed to hide behind the very act of smiling.
“There. Like that. No, head a bit further; raise your eyes. No, lower them.” Antonino was pursuing, within that box, something of Bice that all at once seemed most precious to him, absolute.
“Now you’re casting a shadow, move into the light. No, it was better before.”
There were many possible photographs of Bice and many Bices impossible to photograph, but what he was seeking was the unique photograph that would contain the former and the latter.
“I can’t get you,” his voice emerged, stifled and complaining from beneath the black hood, “I can’t get you any more; I can’t manage to get you.”
He freed himself from the cloth and straightened up again. He was doing it all wrong, from the beginning. That expression, that accent, that secret he seemed on the very point of capturing in her face was something that drew him into the quicksands of moods, humors, psychology: he too was one of those who pursue life as it flees, a hunter of the unattainable, like the takers of snapshots.
He had to follow the opposite path: aim at a portrait completely on the surface, evident, unequivocal, that did not elude conventional appearance, the stereotype, the mask. The mask, being first of all a social, historical product, contains more truth than any image claiming to be “true”; it bears a quantity of meanings that will gradually be revealed. Wasn’t this precisely Antonino’s intention in setting up this fair-stall of a studio?
He observed Bice. He should start with the exterior elements of her appearance. In Bice’s way of dressing and fixing herself up – he thought – you could recognize the somewhat nostalgic, somewhat ironic intention, widespread in the mode of those years, to hark back to the fashions of thirty years earlier. The photograph should underline this intention: why hadn’t he thought of that?
Antonino went to find a tennis racket; Bice should stand up, in a three-quarters turn, the racket under her arm, her face in the pose of a sentimental postcard. To Antonino, from under the black drape, Bice’s image – in the slimness and suitability to the pose and in the unsuitable and almost incongruous aspects that the pose accentuated – seemed very interesting. He made her change position several times, studying the geometry of legs and arms in relation to the racket and to an element in the background. (In the ideal postcard in his mind there should have been the net of the tennis court, but you couldn’t demand too much and Antonino made do with a ping-pong table.)
But he still didn’t feel on safe ground: wasn’t he perhaps trying to photograph memories, or rather, vague echoes of recollection surfacing in the memory? Wasn’t his refusal to live the present as a future memory, as the Sunday photographers did, leading him to attempt an equally unreal operation, namely to give a body to recollection, to substitute it for the present before his very eyes?
“Move! Don’t stand there like a stick! Raise the racket, damn it! Pretend you’re playing tennis!” All of a sudden he was furious. He had realized that it was only by exaggerating the poses that he could achieve an objective alien-ness; only by feigning a movement arrested halfway could he give the impression of the unmoving, the non-living.
Bice obediently followed his orders even when they became vague and contradictory, with a passivity that was also a way of declaring herself out of the game, and yet somehow insinuating, in this game that was not hers, the unpredictable moves of a mysterious match of her own. What Antonino now was expecting of Bice, telling her to put her legs and arms this way and that way, was not so much the simple execution of a plan, as her response to the violence he was doing her with his demands, an unforeseeable aggressive reply to this violence that he was being driven more and more to wreak on her.
It was like a dream, Antonino thought, contemplating, buried in the darkness, that improbable tennis-player filtered in the glass rectangle: like a dream, when a presence coming from the depth of memory advances, is recognized, and then suddenly is transformed into something unexpected, something that even before the transformation is already frightening, because there’s no telling what it might be transformed into.
Did he want to photograph dreams? This suspicion struck him dumb, hidden in that ostrich refuge of his like an idiot, the bulb in his hand; and meanwhile Bice, left to herself, continued a kind of grotesque dance, freezing in exaggerated tennis poses, backhand, drive, raisin
g the racket high or lowering it to the ground as if the gaze coming from that glass eye were the ball she continued to slam back.
“Stop, what’s this nonsense? This isn’t what I had in mind,” and Antonino covered the camera with the cloth and began pacing up and down the room.
It was all the fault of that dress, with its tennis, pre-war connotations . . . It had to be admitted that in a street-dress the kind of photograph he described couldn’t be taken. A certain solemnity was needed, a certain pomp, like the official photos of queens. Only in evening dress would Bice become a photographic subject, with the décolleté that marks a distinct line between the white of the skin and the darkness of the fabric underlined by the glitter of jewels, a boundary between an essence of woman, almost atemporal and almost impersonal in her nakedness, and the other abstraction, social this time, the dress, symbol of an equally impersonal role, like the drapery of an allegorical statue.
He approached Bice, began to unbutton the dress at the neck, over the bosom, and slip it down on her shoulders. He had thought of certain nineteenth-century photographs of women in which from the white of the cardboard the face emerges, the neck, the line of the bared shoulders, and all the rest disappears into the whiteness.
This was the portrait outside of time and of space that he now wanted: he wasn’t quite sure how it was achieved, but he was determined to succeed. He set the spotlight on Bice, moved the camera closer, fiddled around under the cloth adjusting the aperture of the lens. He looked into it. Bice was naked.
She had made the dress slip down to her feet; she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it; she had taken a step forward; no, a step backward, which was like her whole body’s advancing in the picture; she stood erect, tall, before the camera, calm, looking straight ahead, as if she were alone.
Antonino felt the sight of her enter his eyes and occupy the whole visual field, removing it from the flux of casual and fragmentary images, concentrating time and space in a finite form. And as if this visual surprise and the impression of the plate were two reflexes connected among themselves, he immediately pressed the bulb, loaded the camera again, snapped, put in another plate, snapped, and went on changing plates and snapping, mumbling, stifled by the cloth: “There, that’s right now, yes, again, I’m getting you fine now, another.’