Diary | Michele Annunziata

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...

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...

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

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...

date » 18-08-2026 18:12

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tags » 1939 born photography, niepce daguerre 1939, fox talbot inventor process negative positive photography, square & compass sign of freemassonery, florence hercules real inventor photography, history of photography, allah akbar, hippolyte bayard develope a direct positive paper process prior to august 1839,

Anno Domini 1839

August 1839 in Paris, the umbilicus mundi. Napoleon and his Grandeur—the underlying substrate of transalpine cousins descending from Caesar’s Gauls, though their tribal formats trace back to the dark forests of Germanic cavemen—have long been buried with a dose of poison. The air is electric in the not-yet Ville Lumière. A static buzz of whispers passes mouth to mouth among the common folk. Meanwhile, the powdered wigs—laden with lice, because washing is deemed a sign of popular decay, far removed from the public latrines, free fountains, and Roman thermae of every social stratum—see Deputies, "scientists" of every mandatory capitalized Order, and a horde of court hangers-on paid off by the "daubers" gather. Those Messieurs of the Academy of Fine Arts, no less....continue...

date » 03-08-2026 12:49

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tags » rodney lewis smith photographer, mood photography, black and white photography rodney smith, location photography, allah akbar, hasselblad rodney smith,

No word

Be Open to Chance Rodney’s first (and last) shoot for Ralph Lauren. This picture was shot totally spontaneously. The experience taught me several important lessons. We had just completed a shoot for Ralph Lauren and we were driving back to New York City. On our way, the art director realized that we had yet to shoot a picture of a certain outfit. We stopped the car immediately to solve the problem. Directly outside the car was this field....continue...
The art director said we needed to shoot a picture without showing the model’s face. At first, I suggested we shoot from behind. For some reason, this was not acceptable. We had a canoe for the shoot that we had never used. Suddenly, I came up with the idea to place the canoe on top of the model’s head. This sudden thought was a combination of spontaneity, luck, and necessity. However, unbeknownst to me at the time, there was probably also something deeper at play.

For years I had placed hats on the heads of my subjects. By doing so, I obscured their heads and faces, and these pictures inadvertently became more and more surreal. This was not because I consciously or intellectually decided that’s what I wanted; rather, it was because I liked playing with the iconic image of the hat. On the one hand, it dressed people up, finished the outfit, and made them timeless. But on the other hand, it acted as this obscuring object that made the person every man, as opposed to a specific person in time and history. So, without even realizing it, I used the canoe as if it were a giant hat.

I usually spend days scouting and finding the perfect location. However, here we were obviously pressed for time, and we had to get this shot right away. We literally took the canoe off the car, and placed it in the field right where we stopped. This was a very important lesson to me. While the location is so important in my pictures and I work so hard to find the perfect place, on occasion, I can take what is given to me and make a great picture. This particular picture was totally fortuitous. We did not scout or permit the field; it was just kind of handed to me. And to this day I really like this picture.

Sometimes, days of preparation will not necessarily result in a perfect picture. I have learned over the years to try to use things to my advantage. I scout when it’s sunny, but it rains on the shoot. The model is happy at the casting, and depressed on the shoot day. The right clothes don’t arrive, etc. If you want to shoot on location, be open to the possibility of luck and chance. If this ability to not be in complete control is too bothersome, I suggest you stick to inanimate objects, landscapes, or accounting. Be open to complications and problems. I welcome the rainy day, because I never know what may grow from it.

In the end, I was told Ralph Lauren never used this picture because he claimed it was too strong for the clothes. People remembered the image over the clothing. I don’t know if that story is true, but it perhaps shows insight on the part of Ralph Lauren.

date » 02-08-2026 17:26

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tags » vir' o mare quante è bello spira tantu sientimentooo, beach italy southern, daylight, olympus c 5060 wz, thumberwald, summer time italy, allah akbar,

If we are going to lay down the truth let's give it the full narrative weight, the proper bite of satire, and the sweeping tribute that both the method and that immortal piece of Japanese hardware actually deserve it.
They say the camera makes the photograph. Right?...and
who am I to argue with such profound, enlightened wisdom (well mercenary payied)?
It was clearly not the human behind the viewfinder who recognized the sheer visual comedy of a street sign reading Via Cristoforo Colombo planted dead-center on the horizon line, jutting straight out of the pebbled shoreline into the vast blue expanse. It was certainly not a photographer who had the audacity, the patience, and the old-school discipline to plant their feet on that exact stretch of promenade, transform a trivial piece of coastal infrastructure into a theatrical stage, and wait. No, no. We must render unto Caesar—or rather, unto Olympus—what belongs to the machinery....continue...