"Untitled #3"

pigment-based inkjet print on plywood board, acrylic glass

It is 1844 when an ingenious English inventor, Henry Fox Talbot, takes a leaf, gently places it on a sensitised sheet of paper, covers it firmly with a glass sheet and exposes it to light, thus obtaining “its impression on paper”. No-one until then had dared making a photographic representation of a plant (on the other hand, the invention was still in its infancy) and if this image went down in history, it is also because it was included – table VII – in “The Pencil of Nature”, the first ever photography book, with which Talbot disclosed the printing technique he himself define as calotype, from the Greek kalòs, “ beautiful”. Of course, when observing it today, that leaf, albeit showing all of the details of its structure, appears a little bit of a disappointment. The reason is that it slavishly traces the aesthetics of herbals: substantially the leaf, that was cut, is not only dead, but it also appears so. In the attempt to capture the vitality of the universe, as the beautiful title of the book suggests, the photographer froze it in an immobile icon, and so observers find themselves in the same situation of those who, leafing through the book, might find the lifeless shape of a now-faded flower, ripped from its exuberance in unknown times in a vain attempt to preserve it. As it is easy to imagine, these aesthetic choices were the fruit of a vision of the world that considered the plant world undeserving of attention if not for taxonomy, merely for classification purposes. When a cultivated and creative photographer like Caroline Gavazzi decides to approach the plant world, it is inevitable that she will research a different route to expression, a more markedly personal and original one. She does so selecting as a privileged subject a number of plants held in a glasshouse that both protects and imprisons them. Before photographing them, she observes and studies them, tries to steal their secrets, respectfully listens to the silence of the environment hosting them, only just disturbed by the whirring of a lamp or the dripping of a tap. But it is especially the colours and indefiniteness of shapes that entices her creativity, recalling the aesthetics and world vision of the artistic movement she loves and favours: Impressionism. Though feeling an urge to remove her style of expression from realism, Gavazzi is aware that she needs to grasp a different vision, suggested by the glass through which she photographs the plants. Intercepting light, the glass displays the droplets that run across its surface, setting a distance that stands in the line of view, creating unexpected colour effects. The dialogue between inside and outside is now more intimate, as it is the photographer herself who enhances – though careful choices in composition – the intensity of her feelings, the strength of the sensations she wishes to share with those observing her works - now windows opening on a world awaiting discovery. You just need to see those plants to understand how they are pervaded by intense vitality: you can notice it when they crowd towards visibility, when one extends a stalk or lays a leaf on the surface of the glass, magnifying its details; when a flower blooms silently removing itself with quiet modesty from direct sunlight. It is not, even though it would seem so, a fairy tale intuition – the most recent plant neurobiology research confirm how plants have an ability to “see”, chasing light, moving to seek it out; how they perceive sound through vibrations, and recognise the signs of danger. If it is true – and it is – that every present having its own force needs to always reflect on the past to advance, Gavazzi seeks out the antique glass used by Fox Talbot to imprison his 19th century leaf and observes it with a new awareness: is it the barrier used as protection to enable those plants to survive better, is it the glass cabinet inside which the conditions of an eco-system with an artificially-monitored equilibrium is created, is it the prison from within which the plants send out a desperate call to freedom? The question remains by choice open to ambiguous replies. The photographer includes all of these elements within her delicate and poetic approach: she places herself before her subjects with the intention of grasping their message, and through her pictures she creates the atmospheres of a vibrant and mysterious world, where everything is pervaded by a pulsating vitality, like a single, communal sigh.
(Roberto Mutti)