© 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...
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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
