I used to believe photography could tell most of a story, a place, or an event, preserving those precious details forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kXy0Zj2ZDI
I used to believe that photography could tell most of a story, a place, or a social event, and that it possessed the absolute power to preserve these precious details forever.
I was wrong.
I certainly do not wish to diminish years of reflections and thousands of essays written on the aesthetics of the image; however, after long personal research on the photographic medium, I reached the conclusion that while a photo can indeed freeze a single instant forever, it remains just a single, lightning-fast blink of an eye.
Would you ever be able, by observing a single frame extracted at random, to understand the plot, development, and nuances of an entire film?
Of course, from that single frame, many things could be inferred and deduced. But the complete story, with its sounds, rhythms, hidden details, and complexity of secondary characters, will always remain inaccessible. If a photograph is not accompanied by a written description from the author, it will end up speaking solely of that thousandth of a second, excluding the whole wealth of sensations, noises, and emotions experienced by the photographer in the field.
From my perspective, video is one of the few tools capable of capturing reality "in full." Someone defined cinema or video as 24 photographs per second; true, but to this extraordinary visual sequence is added an essential component: ambient audio.
Thinking back to the hundreds of random and unrepeatable encounters made along Lucanian roads over the past 4 years of travel for the Un giro in Basilicata project, I realized that people's faces, their laughter, and the sounds of villages deserved to be heard.
I often take a step back in time and imagine masters of photography like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, or David Seymour: think how extraordinary it would be if, in addition to their immortal geometric images, they had left us small audio and video fragments of the people met on the streets in the 1930s or 40s.
From this reflection was born the web series Postcards from Basilicata: an attempt to portray my land and its inhabitants without needing words or didactic explanations, but letting the sounds of wind, the crunch of footsteps, and the direct gaze of people in front of the lens speak for themselves.
The project unfolds across four fundamental stages, which you can explore here:
Roberto Lacava