Mario Carrieri

artist

Beloved Light
Mario Carrieri was born at Milan in 1932. Son of the poet and art critic Raffaele, he grew up in a milieu peopled by such figures as Eugenio Montale, Giorgio De Chirico and Lucio Fontana and he was close to the painters of the "Existential Realism" movement during the period when Milan became a city of art and culture at world level. Carrieri's early vocation for photography was infused with all the passion and drama of the human condition that traversed the poetry and visual arts in the fifties of Milan. In 1959, aged just twenty-seven, he published the volume Milano, Italia, the most important work of Italian photography to be produced in those years. Well aware of the absolute distance separating his own art from the cultural and ideological penury that surrounded him, Carrieri then chose to continue his artistic research in total solitude. In public he only pursued his professional activity, conducted with outstanding success in Europe and the United States in the fields of architecture and design, working for figures such as Aldo Rossi, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel and Norman Foster and for corporate bodies such as Unifor, Knoll and Tecno. His distinctively personal poetic, averse to all fashions and the dominant ideologies, springs from the dramatic dimension in which the dark gravity of the land of the living meets the absolute light of an infinite mystery that corrodes every human limit, opening the vision to the dynamism of life. In 1995 he encountered a grave abandonment for which he had lived and worked for years immersed in suffering. In the still lifes of this period he represented flowers as if struck, shattered, by a cosmic light. A timeless light for a timeless pain. The architecture, the objects, the African sculptures, the still lifes that appear in Carrieri's images emerge from a black and vibrant depth like a cry towards the gift of light.

Where No Sun Shines
by Giovanni Chiaramonte

And the light that remains in my thoughts
Burns and destroys me all within
Petrarch ¹

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Amata luce² (beloved light) is the title Mario Carrieri has chosen for his selection of some of the most significant black-and-white images produced from youth to maturity, during his unflagging professional work and also in the course of a silent artistic practice conducted in purposeful, arduous solitude. After continuing this work through tormented inner resistances and innumerable ripensamenti, he has decided to acknowledge and exhibit it only now he has reached the threshold of the close of his life.

Beloved light, two words that, in Carrieri's intention, should be uttered with the energy of a cry and the intensity of a prayer: as if the tongue were not articulated by thought but, unexpectedly, the voice itself issued directly from the burden of the heart. Because that is where his vision springs from, from that dark and indefinite center that enfolds the self and can only be reached by the echoes of a living word.

Born in Milan in November 1932, under the sign of Scorpio, the volumes in the big library of his home were the toys he loved most, the only ones that never bored him. They allowed him to enter that dimension of reality that made the effort of living worthwhile. "I spent my childhood reading. I hardly studied because I read so much. Practically I passed my adolescence doing the same. Since I had the good fortune to have the run of the library of my father Raffaele, who was a poet and art critic, till the age of twenty-five I read books: that's all I ever did. In fact I remember my mother and the way she used to scold me when she found me reading a book by torchlight under the sheet, because I used to read at night so no one would see I was awake."³

A common sympathy for the suffering of the human condition, and a deep affinity of character attracted him to certain tragic writers of the Modern Period, from Dostoevsky to Camus, from Baudelaire to the Symbolists, from Céline to Gadda If his wide reading brought him closer to the heart of his desires and of the expectations, it distracted him from the school curriculum. In the end it led to his traumatic expulsion from the Parini classical high school, then known as one of the most difficult and conservative in Italy. "They threw me out in my third year of high school, if I remember correctly. The literature teacher wanted us to write an essay on Giosuè Carducci. I retorted that I disliked Carducci. Since I was reading Rimbaud at the time, I asked to be allowed to do an essay on him instead. It caused a scandal! I was immediately sent out of class and suspended. I stopped studying. Expelled because of Carducci and his / love thee pious ox, while I preferred Rimbaud: in the same period of his life, just sixteen years old, he had already written some of the supreme poems of all time. My life was to follow the same pattern. I was to be a great protestor."⁴

This fact, decisive for the future of the young Carrieri, revealed concretely the truth of Joseph Brodsky's words, when he says: "If art teaches anything... it is precisely the private dimension of the human condition... Whether deliberately or not, art stimulates man's sense of his uniqueness, individuality, separateness, transforming him from a social animal into an independent self... In other words, art introduces variants into those little zeroes by which the champions of the common good and the lords of the masses account for their operations... transforming every small zero into a little face, not always pretty, perhaps, but human... And acquiring this uncommon face is, it seems, the meaning of human existence."⁵

The secret dimension of personal creativity, the firmness, the determination, the openness to change that every artist needs to obey and fulfill his vocation quite apart from the conformism of fashions, the stupidity of tendencies, the fanaticism of movements, critical factiousness, pointless consensus-building, facile exaltation, unexpected attacks of depression, the blurring of intuitions: Carrieri certainly began to discover these things in the pages of books. As he grew up, he also heard about them directly in the words and experiences of leading figures in Italian and Milanese culture, in their discussions with his father Raffaele at his home or at the Milan Triennale, the Galleria del Naviglio and the Galleria del Milione.

Above all he learnt how to confront and accept the labyrinth of time, the fragmentation of the present, the irreducible contradictions of different theoretical propositions, the disparate outcomes of similar paths, the incommensurability of individual poetics: all simultaneously and controversially present on the art scene in Milan. An example was Giorgio De Chirico, who, aware that "the door rarely opens on the metaphysical world?⁶ turned from being a brilliant subverter of the tradition of Western painting into the timeless master of the return to the eternal and immortal palette of classical mythology. He asserted: "Decline... in all the arts, like the decline in the quality of everything more or less related to the arts, is a result of the industrialization and mechanization of everything that lends itself to being industrialized and mechanized. The machine diminishes men's intelligence."⁷

Lucio Fontana, grappling with the neon tubes and Wood lights of his early installations, said: "The work of art is destroyed by time. When, in the final conflagration of the universe, time and space no longer exist, there will remain no memory of the monuments raised by mankind, though not a hair of his head may be lost... In the eyes of eternity, the airy art of a minute is all the same as if it lasted a millennium. To this end, with the resources of modern technology, we will make create in the sky: artificial shapes, / rainbows of wonder, / bright signs, / we will transmit, for radio and television, artistic expressions of a new model... Today we spatial artists have escaped from our cities, we have broken out of our wrappings, our physical cortex, and we look at each other, taking photos of earth from rockets in flight In this we are not extolling the supremacy of our minds over this world, but we want to recover our true face, our true image: a change long-awaited, eagerly, by the whole of creation. The spirit spreads its light, in the freedom that has been given us."⁸

The tragic awareness of the irredeemable evil that lives the heart and the history of man, the "new confirmation of Adam's fall"⁹ provided by World War II, the horror of the Holocaust and the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which lit the sky with the light of the possible atomic extermination of mankind, kept Carrieri from the hopeful belief that animated Fontana Even more it made impossible the ideological commitment permeated by a Marxist optimism of the will developed by Treccani, Guttuso, Birolli in the Corrente group.

Resolved not to continue his academic studies, Carrieri found work with the publisher Mondadori. There he was put in charge of the photo archive of the newsmagazine Epoca. This was one of the leading European weeklies and published the great photo-reporters of the day, above all Magnum. His interest was only really aroused by the work of Werner Bischof, by the austerity of his technique, reflecting the influence of Klee and the Bauhaus. Continuing to interest himself in painting and poetry, Carrieri began to mix with some of the artists of his own generation: Arico, Banchieri, Bellandi, Ferroni, Ceretti, Vaglieri, all leading representatives of that strand of painting that Marco Valsecchi called Existential Realism.

"I use the terms group and expressive climate, because existential realism was both," writes Elena Pontiggia. "It was an empirical amalgam, not restrictive, and threshed out above all in conversation between two or three of its members at a time, without effacing their individual differences. .. The Existential Realists all belonged to the generation born in the late twenties and early thirties. Their youth meant they never had to fight, but they lived through the wartime collapse and destruction of Italy, and their suffering in the years of adolescence could never be healed by the euphoria of reconstruction and the postwar boom."¹⁰

The epoch-making breakthrough achieved internationally by Francis Bacon and the painters of the New York school "led the members of Existential Realism to seek a third way, distant from Guttuso's realism or Abstract Art and, precisely because of this, difficult and lonely."¹¹

The path that Carrieri took was in many ways even more difficult and lonely than that of his painter friends. This was partly because, in the vital dynamic of every true vocation, photography was not a goal he had aimed at or a choice gradually developed out of his cultural interests and passions. It was an act of obedience, inconceivable to the pride that was part of his character, and he submitted to it almost with anger. It all happened as if, in his fascination with its unexpected and unpredictable light, photography had chosen him. "Working in the Mondadori archives and having to write catalogue numbers, every blessed day, on negatives, after a while I felt I just couldn't do it any more. I took up photography on my own account, without any formal training. I should say I had always hated taking photos and never really cared much for them, because at the time I was really thinking about making films."¹²

Real cinema, art cinema, was based in Rome, at Cinecitta, then passing through the most glorious phase of its entire history. But Italian television was created in Milan in 1954, in the studios of the RAI (the Italian public service broadcaster) in Corso Sempione. Carrieri produced some of the most famous commercials ever transmitted in "Carosello" (public television's advertising slot). He even won first prize at the Festival of Film Advertising held at the Milan Trade Fair in 1956. Quickly won, the accolade proved barren: Carrieri's eyes were fixed elsewhere, on the drama of the human condition, which lies in the city. This is the place where it unfolds and photography is the image of its revelation.

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In 1957 by the time Carrieri gave up all his other work to produce Milano, Italy,¹³ his obsessive passion for the apparently divergent paths of writing and painting had helped him to achieve a mature mastery of his sensibility and of photography as an artistic instrument to express his vision. The art of Francis Bacon helped him to develop an existentially and creatively decisive understanding. A painting like Study of a Nude from The Human Figure in Motion¹⁴ by the photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge, the sequence of paintings inspired by the Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, revealed to him the secret matrix that governs the metamorphic relationship between the inner and outer figure of body and face: the mystery of the mirror image that, in a painting or photograph, confers on the superficial and obtuse appearance of the visible all the pulsating and intelligent depth of the unseen.

As Bacon said: "Think about a thing like Las Meninas: I think it's the greatest painting that's ever been made ... we don't know what those people looked like, but I think it came nearer to fantasy and imagery more than anything probably ever did. I think Velazquez was very, very extraordinary because if you analyze the heads of Philip IV and people like that, you will see that these are profound distortions. But they are distortions which distort themselves into fact... I think if you want to convey fact and if you have to do it, then this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort, if you can, what is called appearance into image."¹⁵ And Bacon continues, "You're not only aware of the appearance but you're aware of the fact, you're aware of the stuff which it was made of. It's a very odd thing because you're aware of two things, you're aware of the fact this is an artificial thing which is making a reality."¹⁶

Thanks to the work of Edward Weston and Arnold Newman and Ansel Adams' Zone System, Carrieri attained optimal control of the angle of his shots and of tone in black-and-white prints, yet he realized this was still not enough to transfigure a piece of paper called a photograph into an image. "Photography is a very, very poor medium, so you have to use some other factor, a really powerful one: in my case it's light. The only way to express yourself in photography, I believe, is light. Apart from the choice of the view and of the decisive moment to shoot, everything else in photography is built up out of light. As Nadar declared: 'Photography is a wonderful discovery, a science that enthralls the most elevated intelligences, an art that sharpens the most elect intelligences and whose application is within the grasp of the last of the idiots... What can't be learned is the sense of light.'¹⁷ I find this definition perfect. I was simply seeking a way out of the imbecility that envelops much of the world of photography, and my road was light, a light capable of giving shape to all the dimensions, like the act of sculpting. For this reason, my points of reference, beyond Caravaggio and Bacon, were the Eugenio Montale of Notizie dall'Amiata and Dylan Thomas of Light breaks where no sun shines. I've always avoided entering the circle of falsehood and the circle of the deceitful. I found myself, then as now, in a tragic solitude, because I've never been interested in communicating with the history of photography, at least with what I saw being practiced around me. The best of my photography stemmed from delirium rather than knowledge, because I began and continued my work as if it was already a defeat, going ahead desperately to try and retrieve some scrap of truth."¹⁸

The awareness that shines through Mario Carrieri's words is that of an artist gifted with experience and the measure of the absolute, against which man's work stands out for an instant like a shadow against the mystery of the light, before immediately being lost in the darkness.

For Milano, Italia,¹⁹ published in 1959, Carrieri put the whole city in pose: the spaces, the buildings, the shops, the people and the animals, turning them into the theater of a visual one-act drama, divided into ten scenes and 134 photographs.

Scene /opens in the distance of the plain, with the black of the soil and the white of the snow, between the cramped horizon of working-class apartment blocks and the vacant lots on the streets around Linate airport; moving past a skull and a tattered wire fence, the scene continues amid the factories of Bovisa, the railroad tracks of the Farini freight station, the building site for the Pirelli skyscraper. It rises to aerial views of the Velasca tower and San Vittore prison, then comes down to earth again among the tombs in Greco cemetery, zigzags amid the well-heeled people strolling down Via Montenapoleone and the political graffiti on the walls of the outer city, to the wholly unexpected encounter with Cardinal Montini, in the act of "bringing God to the new working-class districts", as we read on the poster framed in the following image. It threads its way among people looking for accommodation on a wall papered with advertisements, and a poor man wearing a soldier's cap, who carries his home on his back in the midst of a hostile crowd. Scene / closes in the churches in downtown Milan, with in the foreground a candle that whitens till it fades into the stones of the wall, just as the figure of the man holding it darkens till it merges with the darkness around him.

In the photos, laid out in a pattern devised by Carrieri, the scale of tones of gray is practically absent and every image is rendered by the artist in the literal sense of the term "black and white", in the absolute and irreconcilable contrast between light and darkness.

There is nothing tragic in the streets, the buildings, the views of the city, the figures, the actions frozen by Carrieri in 27 images that make up Scene I. And most of the images in the next nine scenes can hardly be considered tragic: certainly not the counterpoint, placed at the end of Scene II, between the image of the safe being laboriously pushed into a van by three workmen and that of the casket borne on the shoulders of sextons past the Alemagna cafe on Via Manzoni. Nor the image of bedlam in the Stella d'Oro dancehall at the end of Scene VII.

The tragic, as such, does not emerge even from the first of the two images of Scene III: the chipped wall of Viale Papiniano, where the small photo of the executed partisan seems to be oozing blood. The tragic is not in the glazed eye of an animal just butchered and flayed, nor in the bowed head of the old man crossing the railroad bridge at Porta Romana; it is not in the tanks in the parade of June 2 advancing down Corso Sempione for the Anniversary of the Republic, or in the queue of poor people standing in a snowstorm at a soup kitchen in Porta Genova.

In Milano, Italia, the tragedy lies and is revealed in the creation of the image itself, in the linguistic structure of Carrieri's photographs.

By using high-speed 35 mm film printed on high-contrast paper, Carrieri makes the grain of the emulsion sharply visible and by this device he reduces the reality of the world to a single dimension, to the molecular dimension of its structure. The physical variety of the elements that make up the city, the asphalt of the roads, the cement rendering on the walls, the stone and marble of the facades of the houses, the steel of the automobiles, the paper of the posters, the flesh of the people, the fabrics of their garments, the skins of animals, all die in their tactile identity, broken up into a fine grain of infinitesimal particles. In the dark sockets concealing the gleam of their eyes, the faces lose all the humanity of their gaze and this acute distortion effaces all the dignity and the glamour of the body.

In these images, Carrieri does not contemplate the light that springs from the figure of man and the form of his action, with the place of its splendor in the city. He looks directly into the light itself, with a burning desire to find a living memory of this figure, a trace of this form. "Thrusting my face into the eternal light"²⁰ seems to be a constant in the destiny of Western art. To Dante and his descendants, from Velazquez to Robert Adams and Richard Misrach, this light appears, however, "...painted with our likeness."²¹ This vision, in the presence of our image glimpsed for an instant in a dimension that lies beyond all dimensions, makes possible the representation of every dimension of reality. Then every appearance of the visible world, from the detail of the most trivial object to the most wicked bloodshed, everything has to be safeguarded in the dignity and freedom of its essence and, above all, to be rendered lovingly in the superhuman clarity of the image in the mirror.

This is why Dante called his representation of human vicissitudes a "Comedy". Robert Adams, recording the devastation of the American landscape now reduced to simple space of commerce and consumption, in books like What We Bought: The New World,²² testifies that "photography as art does address evil, but it does so broadly as it works to convince us of life's value; the darkness that art combats is the ultimate one, the conclusion that life is without worth and finally better off ended."²³ And Richard Misrach, in the image Dante's View in Canto XVIII of his greatest work,²⁴ does not mean or repeat, like Edward Weston, the lookout point with the same name overlooking the infernal desert in the Californian valley, but the view that raises Dante's gaze to the sky, to the "sweet hue of eastern sapphire"²⁵ grasped in the brightness of a spring dawn.

The ten scenes of Milano, Italia form the single act of a tragedy, in which light burns to ash the world that sees the light in it, so that it vanishes into the absence of absolute whiteness.

"What is Milan? What does it look like? These are not questions which it is worth answering in a book. This volume is not published as a record of Milan; it is not published as a collection of attractive photographs," admits Carrieri in his unsigned note on the cover flap. "The reason for this book is essentially a question. What has Milan to say? The answer (an answer that is not a single sentence, but consists of strings of images strung together with the most candid arbitrariness) given in this book is a dramatic answer."²⁶

The arrival of the volume in the bookstores caused very little stir among either public or critics.²⁷ And yet Carrieri, in the extreme generosity of his hopeless question, had recovered one small truth: the certainty that he was a photographer, with the talent and the courage required to confront the art of "writing in light".

"A strong light dissolves the world," wrote Kafka in Zurau. "Before weak eyes it becomes solidified, before weaker eyes it has fists, before even weaker eyes it becomes prudish and smashes whoever dares look at it."²⁸

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The creative logic and the tonal register of the photographs in Milano, Italia provide a stylistic key to the subsequent work attempted by Mario Carrieri: the short film titled / cinque dolori, with moving images freely inspired by Eugenic Montale and a voiceover reciting four poems from the Mediterranean section of Ossi di seppia and Notizie dall'Amiata from Part IV of Le occasioni. "I never cared for Montale, I didn't understand him," confesses Carrieri, "and it was only after a quarrel with Claudio Olivieri that I understood his greatness."²⁹

The "glory of the full noon / when the trees cast no shadows, / and all that appears around / by too much light turns tawny" becomes Carrieri's theme, taken from Ossi di seppia: the glory that, in its light, inexorably focuses, without any scope for concealment, on "...time made water, / the long talk with the poor dead, the ash, the wind, / the wind that delays, death, the death that lives!"³⁰

"To realize my planned film on Montale," continues Carrieri, "I bought a 16 mm movie camera and used an invertible film in black and white, then printed on a 35 mm negative from which I made the copy for cutting and the final editing. In the images obtained through these stages, things peeled and dissolved at the edges in the light of the frame like the shots in Milano, Italia, I had taken over 25,000 meters of film, an enormous quantity, and, after the editing, which I supervised personally, I sent the first copy to Rome, to the board that selected the shorts to be funded and shown nationwide in theaters. They turned down the film, because the grainy effect I sought so carefully was judged a serious technical flaw instead of a deliberate expressive quality. This spelt disaster for me, because I had put my own money into the production of the film and lost the lot. This marked a turning point in my life and work because from then on I had to devote all my time to working professionally on commission. I began with Amilcare Pizzi, where Milano, Italia was printed. Pizzi was a major printing business used by the international publishers of art books and Christmas presentation volumes for the Italian banks. They asked me to work as a photographer for them and I began to travel the world because UNESCO had ordered a big series on the artistic legacy of humanity. Over the next fifteen years practically all my work was done for Pizzi. Then there was a decline in institutional orders and publishing, so I accepted the offers that came in steadily from the design industry. This was an important step and immensely useful, because finally I was able to make the most of my skill in handling light, which came to me from filming commercials and the experience accumulated in photographing ancient sculpture for the books commissioned by Pizzi. In photographing designer products I began immediately with my lights and my camera angles. Unlike my old friend Aldo Ballo, I used continuous illumination by spotlights, not flashlights, and always put the objects on a pedestal as if on a stage, moving away from the traditional setting in a kind of limbo."³¹

Working to commission forced Carrieri to sacrifice his artistic creativity; he abandoned the subjects and themes of his own vision, but it enabled him to understand the human alienation caused by the methods of production in industrial civilization. It forced him, to an even greater degree, to explore and enhance in every way possible the originality and the technical mastery of his photography.

Seeking complete formal fidelity to the object to be transfigured into an image, he abandoned the earlier harshness of his tonal scale and adopted every possible modulation in the range of grays, though he still retained the extreme notes of the high brightness of the whites and the ultimate gravity of the blacks. In the freedom of angle offered by using a pedestal, in the significant sense of direction provided by using spotlights positioned with meticulous mastery, in which he equaled Henri Alekan, in the inhuman and machinelike precision of detail, in the way the objects stand out momentarily on the verge of disappearing into the darkness that surrounds them, the photos of chairs, tables, sofas, typewriters designed by the masters of design take on a full and independent esthetic value. They become Modernist still lifes, icons of the twentieth century's Utopian desire to create a new world for mankind, "from the spoon to the city" as Hermann Muthesius put it in 1912.

Carrieri never forgot the personal dimension of his artistic vocation. In 1972 he again devoted himself to a project of his own. Until 1974 he spent most of his weekends in Venice, taking over 17,000 color slides in three years' work. The book he planned was never published, because the images failed to come up to his expectations: that uncompromising and jealous desire for the absolute that reveals the honesty of every artist about his own work. Inevitably for Carrieri, the place where reality became visible in the image created by photography was no longer the external life of the world, but the inner void of the studio, a camera obscura animated by a work shaped by the light itself that illuminates it.

Through the force and the modes of this personal vision understood as drama, in the theatrical sense of the term, Carrieri, between 1975 and 1980, revisited a decisive episode in Modernism: the discovery of African sculpture,³² a form of primordial art without a history and without a genealogy, capable of inspiring by its expressive energy the rise of the new, equally without a history and without a genealogy, within the tradition of Western art through the conflicting vicissitudes of the twentieth century.

The photos were exhibited at the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan. The exhibition attracted a big public and some critical misunderstandings, confirming Carrieri's conviction that he should push on towards the completion of his work in solitude. "The historian of photography Lamberto Vitali was a close friend of mine, I adored him: he was an extraordinary person, a fine poet and a great thinker. When he came to the exhibition he told me I had made a mistake in altering the sculptures markedly, I should have taken a more detached approach. He failed to see that I wanted to transform them from exhibits in a museum showcase into something taken out and thrown into life. This was why I had used all the force and all the complexity of my lighting."³³ In these words, the urge to throw into life what is closed in itself and dead to all the true interest of existence, Mario Carrieri describes his own destiny and reveals the opening of a new creative season. This lay in the sequences of Nudes, Flowers and Still Lifes matured in the spring of 1978 by taking photos of the animals embalmed in action poses in the landscapes, fake and spectacular, in the Milan's Natural History Museum. The images of these sequences again confronted Carrieri with the fundamental problem of the ars luds that is photography: the original antagonism and complementarity of light and darkness in the mystery of the Creation.

"I believe that Daguerre, gazing on the dizzy precision of the image of his fossil shells, did not see them as a nature morte, but probably the dream come true of restoring the inanimate world to life by means of light And that this strange tangle of the meanings and mysteries of nature, chemical alchemies, laws of optics and physics, was the magical event that gave our gaze to the world, another gaze so as not to forget it, to understand it, or perhaps just for the pleasure we feel in seeing it."³⁴ The enigma photography than Luigi Ghirri meets on the path of the work is the same that confronts Mario Carrieri. And if for Ghirri this enigma is dissolved in the pleasure of sight, for Carrieri the enigma unfolds endlessly, infinitely, with a hopeless tenderness, because, in his eyes the light that brings forms to life is the same energy that also casts them out to die. Seen in these terms, photography cannot restore to life the world of lost forms by means of light and, with the duplicity of its mirror, can only evoke the endless drama of their birth and death. Love filled with desire for the beauty of the female body and for the yearning palpitation of the flesh, with wonder at the fluttering of petals or butterfly wings in the air, is a feeling immediately pierced by the light and darkness that are created and revealed together. In the last images of Carrieri, the vision of love is crucified in the very act of coming to light, like the arm of the woman outstretched in the void, in the simultaneous brightness and darkness that surround her. To obtain this effect, that uses photography to restore the primordial instant of the biblical story of the Creation, Carrieri uses a film floodlight positioned directly overhead that pours down a shaft of direct and powerful light on the scene of his miniature theatres, whose details are further defined by the soft light created by small spot­lights at the sides.

This is a mode of illumination discovered and practiced by the first painter of still lifes in the camera ombrosa of his studio, maintains Alessandro Parronchi, who mentions a text published in 1620: "A united light shed from above without reflections, as could be achieved in a room with its walls painted black, making the brights very bright and the darks very dark, was used to heighten contrasts in painting. This was not done naturally, nor was it practiced or even thought of in earlier centuries or by painters in the past"³⁵ This is the artificial, not natural, method of lighting and painting begun by Caravaggio, following the example of Giambattista della Porta. A hole would be made in the ceiling of a windowless room. The painter "never let any of his figures go out into the daylight, but found a way to make them stand out in the darkness of a closed room, using light shed from above directly onto the principal part of the body, and by leaving the rest in shadow added force to the picture by a sharp contrast between light and shade."³⁶

The artificial manner of Caravaggio marked a breakthrough in Western art, leading later painters like Vermeer, Canaletto and Bellotto to use the camera obscura equipped with Galileo's lens and eventually leading to the invention of photography, ars lucis according to nature and science. It is the quest for an image corresponding to man's destiny, in the reality of experience that is subjective, personal, and, at the same time objective, universal, that forms the artist's vision, driving him to ceaseless experiments with his artistic language, the use of ever new modes and techniques of representation. "Caravaggio, after the experiences in the room with its walls painted black, was the lord of darkness, and he deviates from it only to the small degree requisite to avoid diminishing his tragic, virile, pessimism,"³⁷ recalls Parronchi quoting Roberto Longhi.

In the way he illuminates the scene, the way he handles light and the tragic pessimism of his vision, Carrieri claims for his photography a profound analogy with the painting of Caravaggio: a finally human vision of reality, pierced by grief and moved by the same sense of pity.

The circle of falsehood, the circle of the deceitful, from whom Carrieri held aloof, choosing to work in solitude, is made up of those who flee the drama of reality to take refuge in false hope and false suffering, projected in all ages by the ideology of power, both lay and religious.

Drapery bursts in on the scene of the last images, fluttering brightly like shrouds placed on relics of flowers, fish, skulls, shells. Through existence, Mario Carrieri sought "his own small burning truth"³⁸ in the light of photography, tearing down the veils of hypocrisy from the appearance of life. Now the time has come to shed a veil of light on the appearance of death.

Giovanni Chiaramonte

Notes

¹ Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, XVIII, Einaudi, Turin 1964, p. 20. The epigraph was suggested by Mario Carrieri.

² There is still no history of art that studies the changes in figurative art on the basis of the relationship with light.. .Since we have no definition of art based on its relationship with light, we also lack any history of art sub specie lucis." So, despite the invention of photography in 1839 by Jean-Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot and the invention of the cinema  by  Louis  and  Auguste Lumiere in 1895, Hans Sedlmayr writes in La luce nelle sue manifes-fez/on/art7sfc/>e(1979), published in Italy  by  Aesthetica  Edizioni   in Palermo in 1989. When Sir John Herschel suggested the name writing in lighter Fox Talbot's invention, he fully grasped the nature of vision as language, incomparably easier to learn than all other written or spoken languages yet immediately and universally comprehensible. As such, photography has become an essential instrument of communication for all scientific disciplines and every other human activity, from history to geography, archeology, astronomy, fashion, journalism and mass tourism, and now we are seeing its instant global expansion through cell phones with built-in digital cameras. Just as the workaday writing of humanity branched out into literature in the forms of the epic, lyric and fiction, something similar has happened to photography since its invention, with an unbroken line of innovators who practiced it as artistic creation with absolute critical awareness all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Richard Misrach fetch the highest prices on the market for contemporary work. Perhaps because it is writing with light, ars sub specie lucis, that Roland Barthes between 15 April and 3 June 979 had to write La Chambre claire to be "certain that photography existed, that it had a genius of its own." Despite this, so far not a single history of art has been published that presents organically a study of the work of Pablo Picasso together with that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, of Cecil Beaton with that of Francis Bacon, of Andy Warhol with that of Richard Avedon. And it is still possible in Italy to gain a specialist degree in Art History or Media Studies without having to take a single exam in History of Photography. This is why the exhibition and catalog of Mario Carrieri's work are not the work of a historian or art critic, but of a photographer who, like the artist, has had to reckon with the presence of darkness in the reasons of light

³ From a conversation with Mario Carrieri recorded on 24 June 2004.

⁴ Ibidem.

⁵ Josif Brodskij, Dall'esilio, Adelphi, Milan 1988, p. 42-43.

⁶ Giorgio De Chirico, // meccanismo delpensiero, Einaudi, Turin 1985, p. 406.

⁷ Ibidem, p. 406-407.

⁸ Lucio Fontana, Concetti Spaziali, Einaudi, Turin 1999, p. 470.

⁹ Herman Melville, Clarel, Einaudi, Turin 1999, p. 470.

¹⁰ E Pontiggia (ed.), Tino Vaglieri, Medusa, Milan 2001, p. 13-14.

¹¹ Ibidem, p. 16.

¹² From a conversation with Mario Carrieri recorded on 24 June 2004.

¹³ Mario Carrieri, Milano, Italia, C.M. Lerici Editore, Milan 1959.

¹⁴ Eadweard J. Muybridge,   The Human Figure in Motion, Dover, New York 1955.

¹⁵ Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon. The   Papal  Portraits  of   1953, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego 2002, p. 40.

¹⁶ Ibidem, p. 40.

¹⁷ AAW, Nadar, Einaudi, Turin 1973, p. 64. Nadar spoke these words at an audience on Saturday 12 December 1857 in the Imperial Court of Paris during a law suit in which he claimed exclusive property in the pseudonym "Nadar" Since this statement is a fundamental step in the growing critical awareness of photography, it is worth publishing the  decisive part of  the text. "Photography is a marvelous invention, a science that enthralls the most elevated intelligences, an art that sharpens the most sagacious spirits - and whose application is within the reach of imbeciles. This prodigious art that makes something from nothing, this extraordinary invention after which everything is credible, this impossible problem which scientists had already solved some twenty years since but are still struggling to find a name for, this Photography, which with Applied Electricity and Chloroform makes out nineteenth century the greatest of all centuries - this supernatural photography is practiced every day, in every home, by the first comer and also by the last since it has brought together all the failures in all careers. At every step you can see a painter who has never painted, a tenor who has never received a part, engaged in photography. And I say quite seriously that I could make your coachman or doorman two assistant photographers in a single lesson. The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour, the practical elements in a day. This is what can be learnt... so easily and what I have the honor of expounding it to you - which means that everyone, without exception, can aspire from one day to the next to call himself a photographer, without temerity. ... What cannot be learnt... is the sense of light... is the artistic appraisal of the effects produced by lights singly and combined - it is the application of these or those effects depending on the type of physiognomy that you as an artist have to reproduce... What can be learnt even less is the moral intelligence of your subject - is that intuition that enables you to commune with your model, to judge him, guides you to his habits, his ideas, his character, and enables you to obtain, not banally, by chance, just any plastic reproduction, within the reach of the last assistant photographer, but the most familiar and most favorable likeness, the inner resemblance. This is the psychological side of photography: the term does not seem too ambitious."

¹⁸ From a conversation with Mario Carrieri recorded on 24 June 2004.

¹⁹ The author's note on the cover flap is the only writing Carrieri has published so far, and so it seems essential to reprint it entire. "I wanted to produce a city, not reproduce it No selfcontained images. No photographic witticisms. No formalism. No investigative photography. Only the choice of a language and a narrative that lie beyond objective reality and are presented by a specific vision, in images that are as far from motionless as possible. Their origin lies in a sort of rage against what is taken for granted. The myth of the metropolis. Rage at appearances and rage also at what I already knew about photographic techniques. Discovering, I believe, means facing a given reality without defending yourself from it with what you already know and without concealing it with your professional skills. Probing inside things, going back to their origins, to that dose of essential and burning truth, and then seeking to reconstruct and present your own little piece of scalding truth at the highest possible temperature, while rejecting wishful thinking and confessions."

²⁰ Dante  Alighieri, The  Divine Comedy, Paradise, XXXIII, 83.

²¹ Ibidem, verse 131.

²² Robert Adams, What We Bought: The New World,  Stiftung Niedersachsen, Hanover 1995.

²³ Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography. Essays in Defense of Traditional Values, Aperture, New York 1996, p. 70

²⁴ A.Tucker (ed.), Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1996, p. 179.

²⁶ Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, I, 14.

²⁶ Giuseppe Trevisani, in Mario Carrieri, Milano, Italia, op. cit

²⁷ The most significant criticism of Mario Carrieri's book was by Giuseppe Turroni in Nuova fotografia italiana, Schwarz Editore, Milan 1959, p. 63-64: "Mario Carrieri draws on a pictorial approach understood in the most cultivated sense. His book on Milan may alarm the last of the Arcadians, but it is at least original, and discovers a neurotic, massified Milan. The youthful Carrieri embodies Klein's influence wholly in the content and not in the form, in the purely graphic quality, in the page layout (antithetical to that of the celebrated New York). Klein may not be a very great photographer (Cartier-Bresson is much greater and speaks much less) but he expresses a necessity, a breakthrough in world photography; he reveals the saturation of the old themes and denounces an open Expressionism in the framing of objects and faces, landscapes and views of the city. The specific risks being suffocated by the standardized, by the formal sophisms, technicisms and stylistic features so dear to photographers across the Atlantic. In Klein's work the specific becomes alarming, rapid, allusive: he means to dissect reality and give it back to us in a contorted kaleidoscope of emotions. Carrieri's method is quite different, but it is in the rhythm of the themes that he shows he has listened to the best voices of American photography (the most advanced in the modern world, together with the Japanese, but on the plane of formal and stylistic mastery). Carrieri, like Niccolai, grew up outside the schools. His approach to photography is instinctive, he grasps the best narrative opportunities."

On 18 October 1959 an exhibition (Mostra della fotografia italiana d'oggi) was held at the Biblioteca Comunale of Villa Zorn in Sesto San Giovanni. Forty-six photographers were represented, including Mario Carrieri, selected on typological criteria by Tranquillo Casiraghi. At the close of the exhibition Italo Zannier gave a paper titled Problemi del giornalismo e dell'editoria in Italia, from which the comes following quotation (now in the book by Cesare Colombo Lo sguardo critico. Cultura e fotografia in Italia 1943-1968, Agora Editrice, Turin 2003): "No one will doubt that the reader is attracted immediately by the title, by what it promises. The average reader, I mean, the kind that is the mainstay of our publishing industry, whether in the case of photo books or other kinds. The photo book is considered a gift book, because its price means not everyone can afford it, but this is certainly not the sole function of a book of photographs. The choice of the subjects, on the one hand of little general interest, or excessively intellectual (and here we can mention Mario Carrieri's recent Milano, Italia), and on the other the high publication costs due to small print runs and the sometimes excessive elegance of the books themselves, are the principal causes of the modest success of photo books in Italy." In his Storia Sociale delta fotografia (Feltrinelli, Milan 1976, p. 359), Ando Gilardi calls Mario Carrieri's photo of the executed partisan in Milano, Italia "one of the ten masterpieces of Italian photography."

²⁸ Franz Kafka, Aforismi di Zurau, Adelphi, Milan 2004, p. 54.

²⁹ From a conversation with Mario Carrieri  recorded on  5 August 2004.

³⁰ Eugenic Montale, L'opera in versi, Einaudi, Turin 1980, p. 37.

³¹ From a conversation with Mario Carrieri  recorded  on  5 August 2004.

³² In Autumn  1914, at the 291 Gallery of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas curated the first exhibition of African sculpture to be presented in a space devoted to contemporary art and not an anthropological museum. The influence of this exhibition was so important that the National Gallery of Washington  partially reconstructed it and presented it in 2001 in its exhibition Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries.

³³ From a conversation with Mario Carrieri  recorded on  5 August 2004.

³⁴ Luigi Ghirri, L'enigma fotografia, in R Costantini, G. Chiaramonte (eds.), Luigi Ghirri. Niente di antico sotto il sole, SEI, Turin 1997 p. 122.

³⁵ Alessandro Parronchi, Caravaggio, Medusa, Milan 2002, p. 19.

³⁶ Ibidem, p. 30.

³⁷ Ibidem, p. 19.

³⁸ Mario Carrieri, Milano, Italia, op. cit

Biographical Note
by Francesco Zanot

Mario Carrieri was born in Milan in November 1932. His father Raffaele, the author of numerous collections of poetry and even more numerous writ­ings on art, led a very active life that saw him, when only fifteen years old, fighting by the side of D'Annunzio in the adventure of Fiume, and later creating a wide network of friendships and professional relationships with some of the leading cultural figures of the period, including Modigliani, Picasso, Marini, Campigli, the founders of Futurism and Vittorio Bodini.

In the early '50s, after abandoning his academic career because of insuperable incompatibility with the conservatism of the teaching staff, the young Mario Carrieri was taken on by the Mondadori to catalogue the photo archive of the weekly newsmagazine Epoca, recently launched on the market by the Milanese publishing house. Carrieri spent the central years of the decade making a number of commercials, some transmitted on Carosello (Italian public television's advertising slot). He won important recognition (the Diploma of the Gran Prix and the A.P.C. Cup) at the Milan Trade Fair's Film Advertising Festival in 1956.

In 1957 he gave up all his other work and concentrated on the production of a wide-ranging photographic record of Milan. Between January and August of the following year he used a small-format camera to take 3500 shots of the city within the circle of the old customs houses: 134 were selected in 1959 to form the sequence, divided into ten "scenes" of the volume Milano, Italia, published by C.M. Lerici and received by the critics with substantial indifference. The only voice raised firmly in its defense was that of another photographer, Ugo Mulas. His support was the start of a close friendship between them. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and other European museums acquired for their collections many of the photos that had appeared in the volume.

Beginning in 1962, Carrieri spent two years collecting material for / Cinque Dolori, a short film freely inspired by the poetry of Eugenic Montale. At the same time, prompted by Roberto Sanesi, he planned a documentary, never made, on the life and work of Dylan Thomas, to be filmed in Wales, the poets birthplace.

Then followed fifteen years when Amilcare Pizzi, a printing firm that worked largely for international art publishers, commissioned Carrieri to travel worldwide taking photos for a series funded by UNESCO on the artistic legacy of humanity. It gave special emphasis to ancient sculpture, from the Etruscans to the Greeks, Romans and ancient Egyptians, for which he received a further order from the Menil Foundation in Houston. In the early 1970s Carrieri took over the studio in Via Spallanzani vacated by Ugo Mulas, then seriously sick, and began a close collaboration that has lasted down to the present with leading designers in Italy and abroad.

Over a three-year period, 1972-1974, he spent his weekends working in Venice. Despite taking over 17,000 color slides he failed to produce the book he had originally imagined, disappointed by the difference between the final corpus of photographs and his expectations.

Between 1975 and 1977 he produced a long series of images of African sculpture in color and black and white. They were exhibited in early 1981 at the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan and published in the catalog of the show (Mazzotta), with an introduction by Emilio Tadini, as well as in a special Italian edition of Karen Blixen's Out of Africa commissioned by Olivetti the same year.

In 1978 he began working on the theme of still life, completing a rich collection of works that have never been shown until this retrospective in his Milan studio and home.

In the late '90s Carrieri devoted himself to the photographic interpretation of the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. His images formed an independent section of a traveling exhibition of the originals previewed in August of 1999 in the Church of San Stae in Venice, and accompanied the relevant volume Rodin: Plasters and Bronzes by Robert Gordon and Mondiale Est Group.

In the biographies that have appeared so far the writer has had this to say of himself: "Though he has an awful character and tends towards isolation, sometimes he has been obliged to do some personal and collective exhibitions. Belonging to the lonely category of the visionary, he does not love the fleeting moment in photography. Perhaps it is for this reason that he doesn't go about with a camera slung round his neck but prefers to support the ordeal of traveling the world lugging with him all 906 kilos of his equipment"

Francesco Zanot

From 1980 Mario Carrieri worked for the best design companies as Knoll, Steelcase, Cassina, Techo, Unifor, etc. and for the best architects as Richard Meyer, Renzo Piano, Michele De Lucchi, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster, Aldo Rossi, etc.

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