date » 02-05-2026 09:16
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tags » analogic era, kodak epr 64, slide kodak, reportage, ferrania papers, ferrania p 30, tomato recipe, hands to work, natural light, food photography, zeiss 135 mm, contax rts,
© archive manunzio
The strength of those hands, etched with deep furrows and engaged in the ritual of cunserv' (tomato in bottle for winter seanson when in old time never tomato is possible to made any recipe), tells a story that crosses and connects generations.
This image captures a moment of the domestic tomato ritual from a place here in Lucania in southern Italy, where a "cunserv' p' l'invern'" (stock tomato for winter) was both a necessity and an art (again, for example, a tall and shapely aunt tried to do in New York in the Sixties) like (other memory) the wine made by Agostino Coppola from Bernalda, in the province of Matera—who, in the 1920s, produced wine in the basement of his New York apartment building—this quintessentially female ritual represents an identity that Generation Z is entirely unaware of.
The Rendering of the Film: The chromatic density of the EPR 64 slide emerges with that deep blue that only the chemistry of the last century could deliver, preserved here by the reproduction made with my faithful iPhone "sketchbook".
The 135mm lens Zeiss, used in this shoot, on the Contax RTS isolated the moment with surgical precision, transforming domestic labor into a Mandala of pure concentration, free from distractions.
The Invisible Retouch: The intervention of the "trained silicon" acted like my uncle's that via pencil, on the inclined table, retouched the negative for studio-portrait as Hollywood scene essence, eliminating those intruders that were impossible to remove on location at the time of the shoot in the 1970s.
Professional Technique: Despite the use of Photoshop Elements, the structure of the image maintains that analog dignity belonging to my professional history with Ferrania and its specific surfaces.
