The Rule

"... emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life"
Oscar Wilde The critic as artist

A very particular place in my life does have GIO, the architect Virgilio Vercelloni. I knew him thanks to Giulio Redaelli, docent at the Politecnico University in Milan, who showed him of my works, the one representing the port of Brindisi. I was still a young idealist who was wandering with a camera around the neck, searching for the picturesque, keen on my passion. The works that he proposed were always exciting and I was strongly pervaded by his ideas and considerateness. Soon I realized that photography couldn’t be the only purpose of my engagement and that the primacy should be up to the subject therein contained, that is to the communication and divulgation. At that time I knew that I wouldn’t press that button anymore to produce pictures to hang (meaning to show at photography exhibitions). So in August 1988 he put me onto a helicopter and asked me to shoot the whole suburbs around Milan, a complete 360° tour looking towards the centre of the town, towards the Duomo, for the book about the town’s urban environment to be published by the end of that year. Those places appeared in their real shape, they could be obtained with a minimum of intermediation and above all not by means of any aesthetic research, simply just like something magnified by a microscope’s lens. A work instrument, a document for knowing and planning.

I spent about 10 years working, discussing and disputing with GIO, and today I’m still trying to make good use of that extraordinary experience, continuing what I began with him. Once I made a portrait of him and after having traced his features he gave it back to me drawn onto a piece of tracing paper which I’m still keeping in my own room… the dark one!