Diary | Michele Annunziata

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 » 30-07-2026 11:00

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tags » foto lampo agency potenza, studio foto lampo, rocco abriola foto lampo, street photography, camera g 690 bl fujica, onceas based in milan importer and official warranty fujica for Italy, z' gerard' crisci potenza, thumberwald,

The License (and that's two).

The memories of a photographic studio and also photojournalism agency (Foto-Lampo) lived from the inside hold this extraordinary value: they bring back the raw material, the weight, and the grain of an era with the precision of someone who actually handled the negatives.
And it comes full circle when looking at that vintage advertisement with the round seal at the bottom right: ONCEAS, the Milanese importer with its official warranty for Italy, and the Fujica G690 BL presented as "The camera worth two"....continue...

The ad built its whole pitch on that: eliminating the ultimate flaw of large format by combining the speed of use and thumb-lever advance typical of a 35 mm with the devastating power of the 6x9 frame. On that page, the lenses that gave it shape are:
The Fujinon-S 100 mm f/3.5 (the standard issue lens).
The Fujinon SW S 65 mm f/8 wide-angle (with its 77° field of view, the real culprit behind those display window panoramas).
The Fujinon TS 180 mm f/5.6 medium telephoto (with a 32° field of view) and the historic boxes of Fujicolor N100 roll film.
BL camera, get back to the point,The almost clandestine presence of that beast (the famous "Texas Leica") hidden under the Studio-Agency counter, behind the two-door hatch alongside the battery of Rolleis belonging to the owner Rocco Abriola, captures a visual work culture of bygone days perfectly. The boss's Rollei 2.8 was the daily workhorse, but when there was a real need to widen the field or push the quality, the Fujica was brought out.
Because sure, you could always mount on Rolleiflex the Mutar optical attachments onto the twin-lens reflex—the semi-wide or the medium-telephoto that covered both lenses,: functional, nothing special, but usable. Hovewer the Fujica BL was another story entirely: it was a true giant "Leica" with native interchangeable lenses. And above all, with a 6x9 negative from which you could pull, without ifs or buts, the 50x60 prints for the window display (Foto-Lampo-Agency) on Via Pretoria the Main Street. Those paper giants became real street-side newspapers for the passersby walking downtown, stopping people in their tracks whether for breaking news or a detail of a vernacular theater actor like Z' Gerard' Crisci.
The choice to load the Fujica with the unmatched Agfapan 100 black and white, was the must, as well as the Agfachrome transparencies with that melancholic, Delicate nuances, and beautiful veil of Nordich colors, which could be processed at home at 20°C long before the standardized E-6 cauldron homogenized everything.
Fujica BL used, for example, to hard-hitting news to the brochure or typing courses run by the Canossian Sisters the Fujica was present, always went back to its place under the counter, ready for the next assignment.

Ps. Advertising inside Tutti Fotografi, Editorial Progresso Fotografico, September 1970

date » 20-07-2026 10:57

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tags » foto lampo potenza, agency foto-lampo via pretoria, big print procedure, big balack and white, analogic era, dark room black and white, artisan printer-man black and white, allah akbar, printed matt 20 x 25, colombo boss democratic party italy, thumnerwald,

Big Print statio (part one)

Now, this is going to be a long one, so we are splitting it into two or maybe three episodes for those who have the stomach for it. And let’s be clear: "iPhone-scrollers" or compulsive Android-swipers are definitely not welcome here. Go find some other arena to release your squalid digital discharges. Likewise, the minchiapixel (coin for "pixel-peepers")—too busy measuring the size of their digital junk under a virtual microscope—can take a hike. Both of people, please go play somewhere else...continue

This premise is both necessary and sufficient, because here on Manunzio.it, somewhere between the serious and the facetious, we actually understand and talk about photography. We’ve been doing it for fifteen years on the Manunzio.it, backed by a solid sixty years (see the About section) of pure Analogue experience. It is an epic saga that we are unrolling here—literally—just like the procedure that perfectly matches the cover image.
For anyone who has ever set foot in a darkroom—where you work with actual Alchemy, guiding the print from nigredo (the pitch-black void of the undeveloped negative), through albedo (the magical whitening where the image emerges in the tray), to the final rubedo (the completed, immortal piece)—what the printer-man narrates isn't just a tall tale. It is the absolute, unadulterated truth, and we back it up one hundred percent, no ifs, ands, or buts.
And if I still had the space in this "hovel" that goes by the grand name of an apartment (ha ha ha), we would still know exactly how to develop and print a 50x60 sheet. Yes, for the English-speakers out there, that translates to roughly 19.69 x 23.62 inches—a beast that offers about 20% more surface area than a standard modern A2 sheet.

To "pull" a print that size, when I was a "garzone" of photo-laboratory namde Foto-Lampojust in POtenza my town where living two massive trays were enough: the developer bath and the fixer.

Or rather, once the printing-developing-fixing dance was done, you would swap the trays out (on the temperature-controlled bench) sliding them from right to left (the exact opposite for the development-fix routine) like moving heavy gears in a clockwork press. This secondary fixing bath was the secret key to total archival stability. This meticulous choreography was standard practice for prints crafted as fine art by wise, experienced hands.

Again say, the classic 30x40 cm (12 x 16 inches) or A3/A3 Plus prints, which simply ended up in standard 40x50 cm exhibition frames for "very nice people".
Just remembering the 1970s..Then, those giant "bedsheets" of paper, alongside the smaller 18x24 cm (7 x 9.5 inches) companion prints showcasing local theater plays or notary parades led by Colombo—the local and Prime Minister Christian Democrat boss—would all end up pinned inside the public display case right outside the Via Pretoria (yes same name of castrum romans)on Main Street...
But that’s all for now. For those who want more, the link is right below...

Link...https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qfrJh30iHOE

date » 17-07-2026 16:50

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tags » alex majoli olympus camera, magnum agency, camedia c 5050 as leica camera, reportage black and white, street photography, tumberwald, foto lampo potenza, publifoto carrese, allah akbar, via pretoria potenza italy,

© archive manunzio

Ilford papers...mon amour

What a slice of life, a true marvel. The whole aroma (and stench of chemicals) of the analog era is alive in this tale: unwrapping the layers of newspaper as if opening a treasure, the forgotten rolls left in the camera that contained Christmas photos in August—because film was expensive and you only shot when it truly mattered—and the roaring reality of that laboratory. Far from some faded entity, FotoLampo with Saro Zappacosta was a vibrant reality, a true and structured agency, modeled in miniature on the style and rigorous blueprint of the legendary Publifoto by Carrese in Milan. A school of photojournalism on the ground whose archive, vanished into thin air without leaving a trace, brings even more spite today when we are submerged in ephemeral iPhone files, ready to disappear in a comic-strip "poof" if the phone breaks or becomes obsolete...continue
The 35-liter vertical tanks, the Dektol (that classic Kodak pillar), skipping the stop bath (vice versa used during the printing and fixing paper) to save time, and waiting for the stage to clear:, when Rocchino (Rock) the patron minding his own business on via Pretoria, the Main Street of this latitude; Luciano, the muscle but above all the real mind behind Rocchino, insuperable in his perfidiousness, out to handle his usual erotic affairs already arranged over the phone; and finally Diego, an alter-ego of myself, also out after women. Everyone out, leaving me finally master of the darkroom. The meticulous, ball-breaking labor of the perfect print on Ilfobrom—good paper, certainly not like the ininimitable Ilford Galerie, but anywa...to Burning and Dodging tecnique by rigorously crossing my hands under the enlarger lens like making shadow puppets, without those cardboard and wire masks that only served to fill up space in the layouts of photography manuals!
silver salts into a slavery of pixels where we still end up doing the exact same fine-tuning work, a continuous adjusting this, no, better that way, burning and dodging, and... damn it, it never ends! Looking at the screen in a sort of perpetual preview, there is still the necessity of a few physical copies to truly call it a print. Same habit, but identical results.
The attached image is eloquent of that atmosphere: the knowing look of the two women captured in the middle of the crowd during a procession many years ago, with a soft black and white, rich in grays and deep blacks. That of Olympus Camedia C-5050 Zoom—a stratospheric camera, the very Camedia series famous for being used on the field by Alex Majoli of Magnum too—employed as a personal Leica, with the shrewdness of setting the internal sharpening to below zero to avoid the fake "digital" look and preserve a nearly analog texture. A stratospheric machine that, thanks to the mathematics of the printer's server (other image hovewer), even ended up on a six-by-three-meter billboard campaign. Impressive, and a testament to the service labs that pull seventy percent out of tiny sensors without doing anything else. A miracle? Maybe: "Mira" (aim) + "culo" (ass)... and damn, what a stroke of luck to be completely hones

date » 27-06-2026 10:11

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tags » still life, backstage photographic set, kemal babdrack, artistic photo, iphone 7, thumberwald,

(Click on to see preview post)

...to be continue...The Backstage...
________________________

They say we are just "self-proclaimed" artists, filtering our slice of reality through the vintage lens of an old Apple 4S, frame a bulding never-finished warehouse near the local Market, a place I visit every other day, because even artists need to eat and keep body and soul together, after all!
A quick, unapologetic frame cleanup in Photoshop Elements—yes, the software they mock us for using from dawn to dusk: otherwise, what kind (a soi-disant artist) of artists would we be?
However, a moment,If everything just ended on the tiny, glowing screen of an iPhone or Android, the journey would be dead. A tiny screen? Not a chance.
continue...
So, enter the print stage with our trusted right hand: the Canon PRO-200 that running on dye-based inks ("water"), not pigments. Because aren’t we supposed to be those "amateurs" impossible? Infact the pros print with their "serious" colors; we, on the other hand, blast it with our spray of counter-colors... and what a climax. Call it vulgar poetic license if you must.
Paper, then. After fifteen years of testing everything under the sun, here stands the Holy Grail: Fabriano Artistico Hot-Pressed.
This is pure, untreated Artistico paper. Not like those Innova )joint-venture with Fabriano) digital sheets coated with Baryta and chemicals just to stop the PRO-200’s water-based ink from bleeding into the fibers. Here, the Artistico surface is naturally sized; the lines and colors don't drown or sink into the core. It holds them right on the edge. A true masterpiece, compà.
Look up at the top left of namefile Amplifon, image of cover: a test run on Semi-Gloss RC paper. Pure garbage. Plastic by name and plastic by nature. Yet, that very same plastic paper printed in black and white commands respect, proving that the medium—synthetic or organic—is an integral part of the chain. From the shutter click to the finishing. That's what those who know call the pure artisan.

Ps. Please note: a digital shoot (on Internet!) will never convey the true essence—the sheer tactile weight of the paper, the crispness of the edge you can actually touch in real life.
Beyond and before the print itself, look at the stage: the living room table, our usual crime scene. Rulers and, noblesse oblige, the legendary Logan Adapt-A-Rule. A pencil, another "motorized" cutting guide, but the Logan with its heavy-duty blade is lethal. Add the mini plastic ruler, the utility knife, and the iPhone serving as our pre-cut calculator. Yes, because I hand-cut this Artistico paper directly from a 50x70 cm sheet... and everything else, compà, is pure skill.
Pss. The backstage (me on step a stool ) for elevated the personal Art (clap clap) shot with an iPhone 7.

Pss. Amplifon nomefile that I used is a Italian Trademark of prosthesis acustic device

date » 08-06-2026 11:33

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tags » potenza my town, southern italy in strange hour summer time, black and white, day photography, street photography, thumberwald compà, analogic era,

© archive manunzio

Ciunnella (as My Africa)
As No any regular clock, this afternoon of whispers and blindin' reflections is sparklin' all along the walls of the Società elettrica lucana— at this time Enterprise called Enel today a big energy. The sun is playin' hide-and-seek with the shadows of the Montereale pine forest up above, a holy kind of woods wrappin' up the trashman’s shack, white like lime, lookin' like some cheap Western movie western set.
Right at the edge of the cliff underneath, wide open there’s that evil, cracked-up ugly big building. On the right side, between the retaining walls and the slopes, rivers of open sewage are top-spillin' straight down toward the garage-workshop of the Calabro-lucana railway.
Behind those walls, a fuckin' beehive is boilin' with raw humanity, leanin' out of balconies with rusty-ass iron railings. Bare-chested kids walkin' barefoot, slops, manure, donkeys brayin', big spitters on the floor, mothers screamin' fit to die, and broken straw chairs with clothes hangin' to dry in the sun. Sows, rabbits, chickens, all mixed up together, no stop, no distance.
Far away, in a dog day of summer stay the taxidriver (of Piazza Prefettura—Piazza Matteotti,) elbows on the railing, is the starin' staring into space And he mutters to himself ca s' la 'ntend'—that the guy is screwin' around with a mother o. And he takes a quiet drag from his Nazionale cigarette while slickin' back his greasy hair, his eyes lingerin' on the common wood box (Wc): a shitter with three planks around it just for a joke of privacy, two holes in the ground, and the whole fuckin' countryside open right on the horizon line.

You see? No Hollywood stars here. This is raw, sun-burnt land . Shadows so black they stain your fingers, and light so sharp it cuts like a razor. Go home Yankee!

date » 24-05-2026 09:24

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tags » agfa scala slide film, contax rts, zeiss lens, aliano province matera, daylight, sensation software, compà, conversion analogic to digital, e1 olympus, e1 macro 35 mm conversion slide in to file,

© archive manunzio

Preamble. The original film analogic Agfa Scala frame is pure, uncompromising black and white. The software (sse you below)didn't recolor anything because it couldn't; those two red-orange points (rught image) appeared where the cat's chest was originally a stark, solid white on the film. It is a physical impossibility for a desaturated workflow, which makes their presence on the print even more haunting.
continue...
Persistence (dedicated to a small, defenseless Miao miao, who is passed away and has nothing to do with photography)

It is simply not true that everything, absolutely everything, is identical. If it were, we would just be little machines, the way some people prefer it nowadays—take, for instance, the pompously named AI, which, truth be told, merely justifies a sea of brain-dead fools minding my own business. In short, remote-controlled, headless consumers trapped in the shopping carousel, spending and wasting: on/off, like/dislike... a sad, lonely, binary code. And final.
So, why the persistence? Like the well-known retinal phenomenon, let's say, when you stare not so much at the sun (which is harmful) but especially at a bright light source. It used to happen just like that on the Plumbicon tubes of old VHS video cameras—the revised tecnology alias of the Super 8 and 8mm home movies d'antan. So, for a little while after, the eye, having stared at that surface, is as if "burned," and it takes time for the image, the spot, the glare to return to the status quo ante.
And what if, vice versa, the mechanism itself fixes an image? Then we are in a tight spot. Because you don't pay attention to it in the moment, but the image encysts itself somewhere—conscious, unconscious, who knows. In fact, that memory—because that's exactly what it is—remains stuck to you somewhere.
This image or door/portal (stylized here to keep it brief) is more than a "threshold," despite what the psych-psychologists would want—those purveyors of cheap tricks for children who never grew up, who talk about a "this side" and "that side" of the line. And if this portal is arched like a mirror reflecting itself into infinity within another mirror... (the childhood amusement of opening a mirrored wardrobe door only to watch it refract into another... dimension, dreamlike or real, who on earth can tell), well, come on, it's just a game.

A film/frame of Agfa Scala slide , deliberately stylized here, which stands as the proven fact—not otherwise—of "persistence".
Scala was the film, Zeiss the lens, and Contax its Prophet, let's say... and right there in the middle, a cat looking at me. Oh, for twenty years that poor cat has been staring at me from that spot, and I'm a mentally retarded, never even noticed. A gaze that goes far beyond, like particles capable of piercing ...
An day, testing and testing prof a papers (not remember brand) to see the effect printed from the Canon PRO-200 inkjet, the image you see on the right is unsettling. And furthermore, in the alchemical transmutation of a filter, everything is transformed. But... could those two red-orange dots be the soul and the heart of that cat?
One might argue, just to make the accounts balance, that the software played its part and all... but no, I'm sorry. The image is de facto black and white. Therefore, how did the software manage to "color" the cat—split into two parts—in that persistent red-orange, right where the Scala film recorded nothing but pure white?

date » 22-05-2026 18:23

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tags » history of photography, black and white photography, european photography of xx century, kemal babdrack, andré kertész,

=== A Father of Photography ===

(Copy & Paste and pay attention at idiot alert for vision on Youtube)
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Q0Y9_5qHUsg

date » 21-05-2026 07:40

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tags » photographic calembour, street photography, allah akbar, black and white photographic, camedia olympus c 5060 wz, camedia jpg perfect, thumberwald, kite & moort,

© archive manunzio

An absolute visual epiphany. My eye—trained to dig beneath the surface where things don't always add up—never just sees a road sign. It perceives volumes, stark graphic contrasts, and in this case, a perfect semantic short circuit.

The transformation between the literal reality on the right and the graphic "truth" on the left is a masterclass in abstraction, in fact
the arrow short circuit, that appears on the right, as an ephemeral reflection of a cloud on the dark glass of the building is transformed by the ruthless, extreme contrast on the left into an organic (face) white shape on a solid black background. It becomes the exact mirror counterpart to the directional arrow, yet inverted in both direction and nature: a geometric, artificial arrow pointing left, and a jagged, natural "cloud" emerging from the dark on the right.

The Resonance (and not just Magnetic) here is a sharp irony in the text of the sign. Risonanza Magnetica (Magnetic Resonance) by definition evokes the act of looking inside, revealing hidden structures beneath the visible surface through harsh contrasts. The version on the left does precisely that: it strips away the superfluous, zeroes out the midtones of the wall and sky, and forces the skeletal, graphic, and conceptual structure of the scene to "resonate."

The "Riservato" (Reserved) sign above the arrow loses its bureaucratic context and turns into a manifesto: a slice of reality strictly isolated and reserved for those who know how to reassemble pitch black and pure white.

date » 09-05-2026 16:08

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tags » reportage aldo moro, death italian aldo moro, dies moro 1978, black and white photograpy, street photography,

----- Death of Aldo Moro -----
1978 - 2026
I go up to the first floor. In the next window there is another colleague, Rolando Fava from ANSA, then Maurizio Piccirilli, and a cameraman from Tele GBR (private television in Rome). The street begins to fill with agents, confusion, and a low hum of voices, but you can sense the epicenter immediately: it is a red Renault 4. The rumor is that they have found a homeless man, dead and abandoned. I start shooting, and I am shooting in color. An officer approaches the car and opens the side door. But in that instant, I see Cossiga arrive—the Minister of the Interior at the time—I shoot again, then the crowd of agents nears the Renault and one policeman turns around and puts a hand to his face, in despair. Simultaneously, from the television turned on in the apartment where I was, an announcement is heard: "News is reaching us this instant that the body of Honorable Moro has been found in Via Caetani." And I was right there, so it was him in the car. From the street, a policeman sees me, points his gun at me, and orders me to come down and hand over the rolls of film. I withdraw from the window and follow the scene through the reflection on the glass. I have only one camera with me and three lenses: a 35, a 50, and above all, a 200. I am the only one who has it. But at that point, the owner of the house, frightened, kicks me out. I leave and climb onto the roof of the building. From above, I see the arrival of the bomb squad. There is a fear that the Red Brigades have booby-trapped the car.
continue...

Ps. Copy & Paste
https://www.giansanti.com/video