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date » 14-09-2026 11:32

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Tonino, pasticciere...con A(h)i A(h)i A(hi)

La fotografia, fotografa la realtà referente, no? No!
Coming soon paisà

date » 10-09-2026 09:45

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tags » paul strand blind new york, book that I writing, manunzio site, photographic culture, history of photography,



The Fortunella


It is the remake of Paul Strand’s Blind (this is a part of book that writing my book and the text left image...here’s why I recount she that cavernous, toothless Pugliese mouth, the personage—a dark abyss of a face—is the very frame of raw, unvarnished survival, mirroring Strand's portrait without a shred of Christian mercy).

Limping up and down the stone pavement of the Main Street all day long, by evening hoisting her carcass up the steep stone stairs of Locanda, clinging to the iron handrail,wheezing all the way back to the "hotel" Regina d'Italia boarding house she eathing. Bundled up, legs swollen tight into coffee-and-milk stockings, sitting watchful at a chocolate-coloured table she eating. She parries the snickers of the locals while plunging her fork into her solitary meal of the day: stewed potatoes. Cold ones, most likely.

Hunched over she own bosom, she count the day’s pennies for a night’s (as Cahrlot in movie The Monel) sleep on an impossible mattress of corn husks of "hotel" Regina d'Italia

date » 03-09-2026 08:04

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tags » luigi ghirri and franco fontana italian photographers, fontana colors of lucania south italy, allah akbar, landscape photography franco fontana uber alles, street photograhy america franco fontana,


Franco Fontana, photographer. He’s dead.


And ninety-two years is a damn good run—a worldly one, for sure. Way back when, Fontana even drifted into these Land (Lucania South Italy) circles; as I recall, hordes of trigger-happy hacks (infuriated pixel-addicts trapped in their own onanistic loop) rushed to bow before the "colorist" Fontana. A man who left his mark across the World and many Galery, as pages of that d'antan monograph published by the then Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri: I Grandi Fotografi" inside it many images of Lucania. As "All Colors of Benetton" or American way of life we could and should remember it. So a disempowered reality, an hyper-colorist image born of fantasies or mink coats—go figure. A fellow Romagnolo, Fontana finds himself his countryman Luigi Ghirri, who has also been underground for quite some time......continue
“The connection and parallel paths during the 1970s of these two Emilians (Ghirri from Scandiano/Reggio Emilia, Fontana from Modena) radically changed the way the Italian landscape and reality were narrated. Franco Fontana established an international reputation thanks to a bold, saturated use of color, reducing the landscape to abstract geometries, flat color blocks, and stark chromatic contrasts. Luigi Ghirri founded a new concept of the Italian landscape based on a conceptual, ironic, and melancholic exploration of everyday life, the provinces, and the signs of representation (maps, postcards, cinema). Despite their stylistic differences—Fontana’s geometric and chromatic abstraction versus Ghirri’s open, conceptual inquiry—their paths frequently crossed. Notable, for instance, was their shared bond with the Emilian cultural scene and even the early support given to Fontana’s work by publishing houses tied to Ghirri. Both remain fundamental points of reference for understanding the evolution of contemporary photography. A reflection on Franco Fontana’s artistic journey and his relationship with Italian landscape photography”—thus rambles the internet, that Great Box. Again Fontana wrote: "My research operation consists of isolating, in space and time, what is normally lost and blended within the infinity of details... the subjects I photograph are merely the pretext... the fascination of the image lies in the violence that created it, a violence necessary to shake off the habits that blind our gaze. We are the carriers and witnesses of the only possible meaning... objectivity is always destined to slip away from us..." — Page 7 of the referenced Fabbri monograph. Ipse dixit, and poorly so, it goes without saying. First off, with this Renaissance-derived egotism—man as the measure of All Things—sure, but with reservations aplenty. And that pleonastic "we" is even worse: pro domo sua rhetoric, straight out of Roman arrogance, Marchese del Grillo style: "...we are us, and you lot aren't shit..." Look at the ravages of Photography for those who chase after the marvels of pixels and increasingly "penetrating" sensors—one has to ask: what kind of backside do you have if the tool is about to pop right out of your mouth? Quarrymen, men who followed boss-men or got two for the price of one... let us speak no more of them and move on to what truly matters to us. So goes the so-called World: you pay the toll like Faust to Mephistopheles. De gustibus.


date » 02-09-2026 11:39

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tags » city life, town life, illusion metropolitan, street photography, allah akbar, woman in street, yellow wall, advertising, motor life, drive-through,


© archive manunzio


...FR...FFF..FR...FRR...



Advertising MOTOR - società di capitale umano, featuring that anthropomorphic "M" that turns the human being into a graphic gear, a balance-sheet commodity—"capital," indeed.
The almost surgical synchronicity: The real figure walking underneath seems literally to "emerge" from the logo, condemned to walk in the same direction, with a measured stride, inside the perimeter traced by the engineers of communication and productivity.
The visual rendering of human (woman) figure, dark and sharp, becomes the living silhouette of corporate/technological solitude, pressed against a neutral wall beneath a massive sign that defines her before she can even define herself....continue...
Prefabricated blocks. For decades, they old us the myth of the frontier and the city on a hill (america way of life, sure), only to leave us with endless expanses of drywall boxes, highway interchanges, and asphalt sprawls that they have the nerve to call a "town" or a "city." An urban design built not for people to live in, but to keep cars moving and billboard ads in place.
Calling a cluster of four warehouses and a strip of drive-thru lanes a "city" is the absolute triumph of form over substance—where boundless ambition meets the desolation. And when the rhetoric of efficiency and "human capital" tries to dress itself up as global civilization, a single glance from the street is all it takes to lay bare its fragile comedy.

date » 29-08-2026 10:24

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tags » sigmund freud sionist hebrew, positivisme science, psyché is not traslable as soul, modern teocracy at base bit, modern era, before and after restored bulding photogray, allah akbar, carl gustav jung soul,


© archive manunzio


Bimbo minchia (the idot)

The true nature of the archive, when stripped of academic sugarcoating, is defined entirely by the duality of those two frames: the testimony of physical presence versus the violence of sanitized erasure.

In the "before" (the silver halide emulsion on the left), the archive is a living stratification. The grain captures the raw texture of the stone, the uneven cobblestones, the communal fountain, and the women bent over their daily labor. This is the physical archive—a material body that absorbed the actual light of that specific moment in time. It holds the wear and tear of existence, the grit of history, and the unfiltered weight of reality. It does not need an algorithm or a theorist to explain itself; the silver on paper retains the fact exactly as it was: hard, rough, and uncompromisingly real....continue

In the "after" (the modern color capture on the right), the archive turns into a sterile makeover. The smooth plaster, the scrubbed facades, and the laid asphalt have wiped away the physical memory of the site, replacing its historical depth with a sanitized, neutral surface. It operates under the exact same logic as an overwritten digital file or a bureaucratic registry: take the unsettling complexity of the past, strip away its friction, and reduce it to a tidy, easily cataloged illusion.

A genuine archive—held on physical paper, sealed in parchment sleeves, and forged through chemistry and time—does not exist to "beautify" history or fit a neat theoretical framework. Its sole duty is to retain the undeniable mark of what occurred.

When real substance is swapped for a superficial coat of paint or a transient pixel, the "after" may look cleaner on paper, but the soul of the space has been evicted. All that remains is an empty shell, primed and ready for the next mindless scroll.

And so the curtain falls on the charade. The Emperor has no clothes, yet it took the unvarnished gaze of the child—the uncorrupted eye that refuses to see fine robes where there is only naked power and bloated dogma—to state the glaring truth.

The entire architecture built by the grand codifiers of Vienna (Sigmund Freud dixit) and their modern corporate heirs rests on a fundamental dread: the fear of raw, unquantifiable life. To take the soul, the Psyche, and drag it down into a mere plumbing system of ducts, retention, and subconscious sewer lines was never an act of liberation. It was an act of aggressive bookkeeping. It turned the mystery of human expression (C. G. Jung), art, and memory into a Ledger of Pathologies.

They replaced the archetype with the diagnosis, the sacred flame with the internal combustion of repressed fluids, and the physical mark of history with an endless, energy-devouring scroll.

The tragedy of the modern consensus—from the Freudians of the early twentieth century to the silicon technocrats of today—is that it cannot abide what it cannot catalog. It hates the stone, the silver halide, the parchment, the ink, and the sheer unpredictability of the artist because all of these demand presence. They demand retention in the true, noble sense: holding fast to reality, bearing witness, and leaving a tangible trace that outlives the temporary noise.

Instead, the world has been handed over to the digital gravediggers, the endless swipers, the consumers of phantom signals who mistake data for memory and a diagnostic label for self-knowledge.

Let the dead bury their dead.

When the servers go cold and the modern spreadsheets collapse under the weight of their own absurdity, what remains will not be the psychoanalytic taxonomies or the algorithms of the Silicon Valley priesthood. It will be what was there at Hammurabi's dawn: the physical mark, the honest contrast, the baked clay, the silver on barite, and the uncompromising voice that refuses to call the Emperor's nakedness a suit of fine silk.


date » 27-08-2026 07:46

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tags » dye ink printer canon, pigment canon printer, longevity and papers printed, allah akbar,



Un dos tres...Mambo...un dos tres...Mambo ah ah ah cha cha cha...Mambo
A stream of consciousness, a true satirical-postmodern zibaldone mixing Ventennio slogans (The Italian Fascist Era), pop refrains, Dante (The Fater of Italian Language) quotes ("o voi ch'avete li 'ntelletti sani..."), Petrolini (1884–1936, The Great satirical italian actor of the 1930s who mocked the solemn rhetoric and superficial snobbery of his era through caricatures like Gastone and Nerone), and a sacrosanct technical obsession for the photographic medium....continue...
Scraping away the surreal patina, the underlying bitterness is crystal clear. It is the eternal issue of technique and memory sold by the pound at the marketing counter:

The Trap of Alla cassa alla cassa! (To the cash register, to the cash register!) and "Mandarin Brand" Rhetoric[infoHide=...continue...]
The irritation toward the "bunnies" (or the influencer/content creator of the day) hired by companies like Canon to pontificate on things they barely understand is entirely justified. It is the commodification of a complex technical discipline, reduced to a superficial sales pitch for Generation Z (or "Ypseter") living in the illusion of an eternal digital present.

The Eternal Dilemma: Dye (Water) vs. Pigment

Here lies the technical and poetic core of the rant—the unmentionable truth masked by marketing under the buzzword "longevity":

Water-based ink (Dye): Possesses fluidity and penetration into the paper fiber (especially on the right semi-gloss or baryta surfaces without too many frills) capable of delivering deep blacks, continuous tonal transitions, and an organic brilliance that pigment can never fully replicate. It holds the three-dimensionality of flesh and blood, even if it pays the toll of lower lightfastness and air stability when left unprotected.

Pigment: Solid, mineral, eternal (those "200 or 1000 years" paraded in technical spec sheets). Yet it often sits on top of the substrate. A dry, protective film, "firing blanks" (a salve), which guarantees survival against glitches and fading memories, but sometimes at the expense of the turgidity and softness that only water-based ink provides.

The Digital Illusion vs. The Physical Object

Leaving an image trapped inside a smartphone or cloud storage is a Platonic shadow destined to vanish at the first system breakdown. Printing is an act of resistance, a necessary "blasphemy," even when commercial dynamics push users to buy the latest gadget at the supermarket (nomen omen) instead of grasping the physics of substrates and color.

Lamborghini or Ferrari to Go to the Supermarket?

The Ferrari, without question. If one must perform an act of empty ostentation ("gaja che pria"—a direct Petrolinian deformation from his Nerone sketch), it should be done with a classic red recalling fresh enamel, rather than the sharp, hyper-technological angles of a modern Lamborghini—far too reminiscent of today's molded plastic.

As for that thirty-third trentino who broke out of the chorus like Jack Frusciante... he might be the only one who didn't run "alla cassa" (to the cash register) to be hypnotized by trinkets.

The real question remains: between a dense, fleshy, yet fragile Dye black, and an eternal yet slightly chalky pigment in the shadows, what price are we willing to pay to salvage memory?


(Copy & Past)
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/J2w6Ea3Yog8&t=99s



date » 25-08-2026 11:35

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tags » print from digital file, support digital papers, ink jet printers canon and epson, dye ink, pigment ink, allah akbar,





(Copy & Past)


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/D4xQhGiM2bQ



date » 22-08-2026 17:43

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tags » still life in house, still life food domestic, still life fruits, window artificial for shoot a pear, iphone 4 s, allah akbar, sniper,


© archive manunzio


Una pera o la pera? This is question...

Ah, the sublime art of taking oneself profoundly un-seriously with maximum technical intent. Here is the view (as) from across the Channel, delivered with the requisite dry, stiff-upper-lip sarcasm.
There is a delightfully quiet subversion at play here: dismantling the modern illusion that sophisticated algorithms and computational wizardry are somehow required to make art, whilst proving that half a century of visual instincts will always outwit a neural network.
A humble A4 sheet, the faint morning light of a kitchen window, and a museum-piece smartphone—quite enough to render the endless parade of multi-lens gadgetry utterly redundant....continue Animate Object, Inanimate Subject: The pear gracefully forfeits its status as a mere still-life fruit to become a rather disgruntled little fellow. That tiny, deliberate edit (via Pshop-Element for an amateur like my, they say people: Vox populi vox dei, exactly? De gustibus) to its blemishes gives it an expression of supreme, understated judgment—as if it, too, is deeply weary of modern digital discourse.
The High-Key Abstraction: Sunlight from the window paired with the paper backdrop effectively bleaches away the mundane clutter of the domestic realm. What remains is a stark, almost clinical canvas that isolates the organic texture, the mottled skin, and that wonderfully off-centre stem.
The Antidote to Pretension: Executing a deliberate piece of visual wit with the most "unsuitable" gear available is a masterclass in quiet irony. It politely demonstrates that real photography resides entirely in how one sees and shapes the light, rather than in the sheer tonnage of one's equipment.
A splendidly sardonic exercise...manages to look the over-engineered, AI-obsessed world dead in the eye and offering nothing else more than a well-timed, exquisite smirk.





date » 22-08-2026 09:44

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tags » canon printers, amerika (k as killer) way of life, shoot on film to reverse in digital, american photographer, allaha akbar, folding camera, panorama printed on digital,




Amerika (k as killer) way...


Every now and then, you have to bring yourself down to the level of ordinary madness of normal people who normally... And recommend, nonetheless, a typical Yankee whose approach is worth a video-listen, if you please—since there are insights that are anything but second-hand for those who, naturally, still practice photography with science, yes, but also with heart... and above all, guts.

Dissecting a Photo: 1964 Sears Department Store
(Copy & Paste)
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_q9i_HEOkxo


Ps. I wrote him...very time I watch her videos, I can’t help but smile. I smile at that classic American madness :) of living in absolute Nothingness and thinking it can be exported as a universal standard. Infamous characters, to put it mildly. Everything modern photography claims to be seems traceable to that "Amerika "with a k of killer)" way of life. Absolute madness. Yet, despite all that, the book she cites is intriguing—though buying it on Amazon costs a fortune, around 150 Euros, which is way too much.
Be that as it may, I appreciate her madness when she turns all those "talks" toward Canon printers. Beautiful machines. I print as an "artist" on the Pro 200 simply for the brilliance of its dye inks. That's all folks.
Manunzio, fotografo dal 1969.


date » 20-08-2026 11:24

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tags » tomato pomodoro, new york tomato, rite and form, esperidi hercules, allah akbar,


© archive manunzio


The Rite and the Form...


An anthropometric and material portrait a narrative of the August "Red Rite" pomodoro/tomato captures the visual, olfactory, and social memory of domestic preservation in the Mezzogiorno.

A moment please: because is more important the etymology and semantics are important: The overlap between cultivation (coltivare) and culture (cultura tout court) finds its practical consecration here. The shift from working the land to defining time and family roles is direct proof of this shared root and "litterary" of books an not only this.
Again, In fact the Myth and geohistorical transit: The ironic re-reading of Hercules' labours and the "golden tomato" of the Hesperides exposes the paradox of academic narratives, drawing a straight line from classical myth to today's socio-economic dynamics of the harvest....continue...
Pomodor/tomato or the Red Sea an other example of Rite: Tomato wedges left to dry in the sun on heavy wooden boards, where flies end up drowned in that dense crimson sea like the Pharaohs of the Biblical text. And for precaution the womens put a mesh netting pulled over them isn't just hygiene—it is a frontline shield for the harvest and Codex alimentarius.
The ritual of preserving: The architecture for season winter prep—from tied strings ('nzerte) of sun-dried peppers to ciraselle (which the barbarians misname "hot chili"), from peaches in syrup to clay jars packed with eggplants, garlic, oil, small onions, and lampascioni sealed tight with waxed paper and twine. It wasn't simple subsistence; it was a biological conquest of the cold season hic et nunc.
During the Rite of pomodoro/tomato and other, was a Taboo and control: The commanding authority of the women and the strict requirement of being in a state of "grace" (excluding anyone on her monthly cycle to prevent spoilage bottle of salsa/suice) stands as one of the most ancient, rigorous biological codes of Mediterranean society.

A bit of personal memory: a my aunty, from around my town to New York strain make same Rite He did the same ritual.: A ritual so powerful it crossed the Atlantic. An yet In the old-style New York of yesterday, a tall, imposing aunt would run the exact same pomodoro operation (as Grandfater of Francis Ford Coppola that make the wine) on her own turf, leaving the local Yankees—especially the women—staring in absolute, wide-eyed bewilderment at this blood-red domestic machinery that no "sauce" label could ever define.





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