Information
Vintage gelatin silver print
cm 22,5 x 17 | 8.8 x 6.6 in.
Photographer's credit stamp on the verso
The two photographs proposed here belong to the first phase of Camisa's research, the one in which he devoted himself to portraiture with rigor and originality. His various travels in the South and North Africa put him in contact with different realities that he interprets with a dry style deliberately far from the rhetoric that had free circulation in the 1950s because, as we know, the poor are more photogenic and the grazing sheep make for much cheap folklore. The close-up shot of the swordfish stretching across the floor takes us directly to observe the woman and child barefoot and sitting on the scales on which the prey will be weighed: both embarrassed, much is told of their silent, ancient world. More direct, proud in their costumes are, on the other hand, the members of a Brotherhood: one notices the photographer to whom he gives a curious glance, while the other is caught in the moment when, pensively, he lights a cigarette.
cm 22,5 x 17 | 8.8 x 6.6 in.
Photographer's credit stamp on the verso
Literature
Photography Year Book 1961, Photography Magazine, pl. 00
Alfredo Camisa (Bologna 1927 – Pescia, Pistoia 2007) florentine by adoption, in the 1950s stands out as a valuable author and sharp critic in the debate that accompanies the postwar period in important magazines and within groups such as Cavalli's Misa and Crocenzi's CCF. He published in “Il Mondo” and won various awards, but in the 1960s he abandoned photography to devote himself to his profession as a chemist. Rediscovered in recent times both in his own world (the FIAF in 2002 dedicated a monograph to him) and in the world of exhibitions and collectors, he is sometimes improperly defined as a neorealist. A free spirit, he has Walker Evans and the social anthropology of “The Family of Men” as references. The two photographs proposed here belong to the first phase of Camisa's research, the one in which he devoted himself to portraiture with rigor and originality. His various travels in the South and North Africa put him in contact with different realities that he interprets with a dry style deliberately far from the rhetoric that had free circulation in the 1950s because, as we know, the poor are more photogenic and the grazing sheep make for much cheap folklore. The close-up shot of the swordfish stretching across the floor takes us directly to observe the woman and child barefoot and sitting on the scales on which the prey will be weighed: both embarrassed, much is told of their silent, ancient world. More direct, proud in their costumes are, on the other hand, the members of a Brotherhood: one notices the photographer to whom he gives a curious glance, while the other is caught in the moment when, pensively, he lights a cigarette.
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Condition report
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