Walter Pescara

What type of printing do you prefer?

If I listened to my heart I would tell you that I prefer silver gelatin prints, 

but the practical sense imposed by the profession leads me to experiment with new materials and to print using the new technologies that I consider most suitable for the specific nature of the subjects from time to time.

What comes first, the idea or the fascination with the material? In other words, does the artistic/photographic project come first, or is it inspired by the techniques and particular processes that strike you?

Generally, the idea comes first. But ideas come from what we know, and knowing we have innovative materials and technologies at our disposal makes our ideas more fertile. Today, with new equipment and the wide variety of media available, imagination can soar even higher.

Do you have any Masters you look up to and feel close to?

I come from a reportage background, my teachers are Magnum photographers: Bresson, Koudelka, Erwitt, Barbey…, but teaching for many years at an Academy of Fine Arts oriented me towards the artistic side of photography.

Over time, starting from documentary photography, I have increasingly oriented myself towards artistic photography, seeking in particular to address Walter Benjamin’s words about the work of art and its reproducibility. I therefore seek to create photographic singularities, often using details from the photographed scene.

I personally saw his “Lighthouses of Wonders” emerge from the mouth of the large Rho printer in the Newlab laboratories.

Collages by Georges Braque, Kurt Schwitters, and the recently (and thankfully) rediscovered Dadaist artist Hannah Höch kept popping into my head, no doubt because of those large red numbers and nautical symbols on the sails, the print media she chose for her photographs.

These images of lighthouses standing out between the sky and the sea interact with the unusual material, highlighting its traces of wear, folds, and heavy stitching, which, conversely, often create directions for the gaze, which is forced to focus on particular areas of the photographic image. 

Metaphorically, moreover, it is as if he had united, through printing, these elements, lighthouses and sails, which are not intended to be close, but only to be looked at from afar, allowing them to each carry the signs of the other.

May I ask you to tell us more about your poetics? What captures your attention and interest, leading you to want to develop a specific intuition?

Yes, the Rho printer was crucial in completing the Fari delle Meraviglie project (with Simone’s invaluable contribution and great patience). For that project, I decided to print the photographs of Italian lighthouses, which I had taken in Kodachrome for the book of the same name published by Ugo Mursia in 1985, on scraps of the old sails that rigged the boats when I shot the reportage in the 1980s.

It was important that they were old sails, now in disuse, the same ones that had been illuminated by those lighthouses that now revealed themselves, even metaphorically, on their surfaces. The technical problem to overcome was the raised seams and the studs, but Rho solved the problem brilliantly.

Collage is certainly a technique that inspires me greatly, and the works of Georges Braque and Kurt Schwitters, as well as those of Robert Rauschenberg, are pertinent and highly inspiring references. Including living matter in the work has a profound meaning; it allows us to simultaneously grasp the artist’s intuition and almost touch his thoughts.

Regarding Hannah Höch’s work, I find Dada to have been a movement that broke with the traditional patterns of classical art, almost a non-art. This is the direction taken by the decontextualization that the Dadaists, beginning with Marcel Duchamp, pursued with regard to the work, whose fascination no longer stems solely from the artistic subject but from the relationship created between the object, the place, and the materials that interact with the object itself.

Printing photographs on old sails goes in this direction and in this edition they are decontextualized and become an integral part of the work.

Future projects?

I recently completed a new body of photographic works printed with the Rho press. This work also has a Dada feel, as I used cement material from walls in various cities around the world as a support…

I have a gallery available, but due to Covid-19, everything has stopped for the moment. I will continue teaching at the Academy to continue learning and keep my brains sharp—those of the students and mine.