Giangiacomo Rocco di Torrepadula

What type of printing do you prefer?

It’s the narrative that guides the technical choices for the shooting and, consequently, the printing. For example, for my work on George Floyd or the Cages, both characterized by a predominance of deep blacks (shot digitally), the only print that holds up is the one on Baryta paper.

Other works, like my cores (color details), require prints that enhance the colors, which leads to different solutions. In this regard, I must say that Newlab has always helped me tremendously in navigating the various options.

Did the idea come first or the fascination with the material?

That is, does the artistic/photographic project come first or is it inspired by particular techniques or processes that have struck you?

Without a doubt, the idea always comes first. The technical choice follows suit.

For example, the Still LiVe series I conceived required the use of analog because I needed the coexistence of very sharp details with the softness of the blurs and intermediate tones typical of large format. In some cases, I needed to emphasize the moral and human value of the person I was photographing, and I did so using the palladium/platinum technique.

When I need to convey a sense of imprecision, I use shooting techniques like pinhole cameras, old cameras, and/or low-definition lenses, and so on. But it all depends on the narrative choice. It’s what determines the technique to use.

 

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

There are so many artists who have taught me a great deal in various fields. I’ve been greatly influenced by color since I was young by Fontana and Roiter. People like Francesco Cito and Luciano Ferrara have also always provided me with constant inspiration, not only photographically, but also in terms of vision and personal style.

In the more artistic realm, the list is endless. Staying here in Italy, I think of Edoardo Romagnoli’s beautiful work on the moons. 

Technically speaking, Ansel Adams is obviously a point of reference even today, I must say more than for the technique of the zone system, for his constant emphasis on the importance of visualizing the image, which unfortunately is too often forgotten.

 

His artistic work focuses on the concept of cognitive bias, a form of evaluation distortion caused by prejudice.

Bias is caused by various factors (individual experience, cultural context, mental patterns and fear of making a decision that causes harm) and if it is true that it is an ancestral mechanism of human cognition linked to the primordial need to rely on instinct as the only yardstick capable of guaranteeing survival, it is equally true that if on the one hand Bias allows you to make a decision in a rather short time, on the other it can undermine its validity.

It is in fact on the concept of Time that I see the corpus of works “The blind sight” composed of three series of works connected 

(“I can’t breathe”, “Yolo”, “Stay with me”) and “Still LiVe”.

This last group of works differs from “The blind sight” in its approach, which is, at first glance, formally aesthetic.

The poetic and conceptual analysis present in “The blind sight”, works that push us to compare the unjustifiable murders of three African-American men by the United States law enforcement, seems to be set aside in favor of the visual presentation of various everyday objects, dressed with renewed interest by an exceptional photographic technique.

The focus on cognitive biases that lead to racism, the matrix of the aforementioned triad, seems to leave room for an ode to slowness.

In “Still Live” the pleasure of observing and the request to the public to give and give themselves time to reflect on what they see are presented, more alive than ever.

“When you go looking for evil in the human race expecting to find it, you will certainly find it” wrote David Swift, director of Hollywood in the sixties, and in my opinion he perfectly describes the cognitive blindness to which the lack of time to analyze and analyze ourselves leads us, the same lack of time that does not allow us to grasp the Beautiful, understood in the Classical sense (“kalòs kai agathòs”).

And if Prince Miškin in Dostoevsky’s Idiot states: “Beauty will save the world”, couldn’t we today say that it is instead “Time to see beauty” that saves us, bypassing our Bias, placing us in a more neutral position and more open to stimuli from the outside world, without barricading us behind supposed certainties?

In reality Blind Sight also includes my most important work: the collaborative mail art project “A Postcard for Floyd”. Starting from one of my images on the Floyd case – I created a postcard that I sent to various people both in the world of Italian art and culture and beyond. I asked him to return it to me with anything he could think of about that episode. I received a much stronger chorus of responses than I imagined and today the approximately 400 postcards are collected in a volume published by Skira (A Postcard for Floyd) and are on display until June 18th in Milan at Assab One. All together with a series of contributions also by black activists who help us understand the problem from their point of view. 

The plurality of voices and expressions is the true strength of this choir.

The title Blind Sight translates to “blindsight.” It’s a very rare disease that causes us to lose our sight, but retains some form of unconscious vision. Those affected react to visual stimuli without being aware of it. This is what happens with prejudice, which often leads us to   behaviors we’re not even aware of. Racism, ultimately, is our blindness to prejudice. Blind Sight is a project that draws on behavioral neuroscience to combat prejudice through art. In this regard, I wouldn’t want to focus Blind Sight solely on American cases. The issue of prejudice concerns us Italians, too. Me, for sure. This is something I make very clear in my book, starting from the introduction.

That said, all my work in recent years actually has a very clear common thread around the reclamation of time and one’s own work. Through a series of personal experiences, I completely changed my life and the priorities I had set for myself. This led to a series of reflections that began with the “Cages” series, in which I reflect on how iconic architecture is beautiful, but at the same time cages for those who live inside it due to the pace of life that imposes it. Still Live, as you said, goes in exactly the same direction: it’s a reappropriation of time that is used to rediscover the beauty in objects no longer in use. Blind Sight was born in parallel because—reflecting on who I was and the values ​​of my life—I realized that I was a racist. From there, I began to delve deeper into behavioral neuroscience: I wanted to understand what was driving the fears in my brain. And as I progressed, the need to completely redefine my life’s priorities grew stronger.

In essence, Blind Sight, Cages, and Stlli Live are all works that revolve around a complete reexamination of who I was and a consequent reappropriation (or at least an attempt to do so) of my time so as to reaffirm a series of values ​​I had undervalued. It’s a journey I probably began without even intending to, and it’s certainly still a long way to go.

 

 

 

Future projects?

I’m working on a project that explores in detail why our brains need to create biases and how to overcome them. This project, too, draws on behavioral neuroscience, but the form of expression will remain artistic. It’s called “The Plot” and will be part of the “Blind Sight” series.