I had the fortune to live in a strong cultural background loving Art, History, Music, Literature and Cinema (my mother was a painter, my father an art-publisher and owned two pre-eminent Milan and Viareggio/Tuscany bookstores). This was the reason for what my "cup of tea" has always been to look for stories and cultural tracks off the beaten paths.
For decades I expressed a double personality: author/journalist and photographer. At the beginning of my career I improved writing (during the first 15 years), then shooting. Even if I studied as young guy, and I loved it, history and cinema and consequently moving images.
Speaking on images I never liked the photo posing as an aesthete but, working for magazines and newspapers, I had to do also spectacular photos for commercial reasons: even if, preparing my reportages, I never abused of wide-angle, cow-boy shot...that refers to western movie of the fifties and then to commercials/advertising.
I always liked more the architectural details, the foreshortened shoots, the fragments of the reality. Actually I'm loving the fringes, the microscopic(al) eyes. Infact to achieve this I created a special lens, a shifting macro, in order to illustrate also the hypovision. Anyhow I feel the tears and I prepare photo polyptichs, something like a short film sequence where the vision is broken but where is possible to feel a fil rouge anyway, even if interrupted.
So, going through 30 years of experience in photography and reportages for magazines, books and newspapers and exploiting my archive, since 2010 I create these photo-installations - called polittici/polyptichs like the historic polyptychs of the european churches (XIV, XV, XVI centuries) - which represent in 5 fragments-details-panels a complete story on places, landscapes, buildings, factories, districts, cities, territories, things, people and situations.
The polittici/polyptychs have an aesthetic value because of rhythm of contrasts, and are prepared using my photo-archive or ad hoc shooting as interiors decoration ( houses, hotels, halls, conference-centers...) or as unusual corporate images for promotion and advertising: banners for fairs, websites, paper press, logo.
Up till now I prepared and sold "polittici" for show-rooms, firms and companies (ATBrescia-transport, Sagafurs/Finland, Park Hyatt Hotel Milan, Fratelli Agnes Winery, Levorato Abrasives, Techint/Tenaris, steelworks in Argentina, Burgenland Tourist Board in Austria, Sumampa show-room in Milan...), exhibitions, private houses.
To see examples of photo-polittici please links works and then polittici.
WORKS ON SECOND HAND BOOKS: LOOS AND REGENERATION OF WRITTEN MEMORY
To create photo-polyptychs - where with 5 fragments I tell a story - of “Bookillers, anatomies of a hypovision" I alternated microscopic details of books with details of letters and words. Using a macro lens assembled by me I took particular shuts assuming the point of view of the mite, who is visually impaired: a microcosm well defined - its future potential meal - and the rest undefined. See: www.photobattaglini.it links exhibitions
Rib of Bookillers, in "A Sea of Pages" the details of books become something different: marine, seaside, waves, beaches and water which is regenerating.
In "Bookillers, Anatomy of a Hypovision" I alternated fragments/details of book's corners and pages with macro-fragments of letters consumed by mites, symbols and metaphors of ignorance and loss of memory.
In "A Sea of Pages" photo-macro details (1 cm) - released on pages, corners, spines of old books - the fragments of books become something different and in this case waves, seas, marines and mostly water which is symbol of a regeneration of old and destroyed books/memory.
In "Untouchables Books/Pages of Rocks " the book's details are similar to nature/rock's wounds.
Also in the single photographic bites the low vision of insects represents, metaphorically, the inability to generate complex and clever visions. And if the meal mite ironically recalls the current and widespread neglect of memory and critical knowledge, the visual over-concentration of insects refers to the inability to think and see the reality with its horizons and its borders.
Like insects on a petal, eyes focus on the micro-detail losing any context overview. The contours evaporate. Without rules. The laws, only those of nature.
The insects roam without visual breaths, no prospects: away from the big ideological visions that are lost in the mists of time. It’s time of the floral mites that leaf through the wind. Ideals and guidelines wither. There are traces, paths undecided, orphan thoughts.