Monday 26 January 2015
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THIS BLOG WAS CREATED IN DEDICATION TO THE PHOTOGRAPHER GINA ALESSANDRA SANGERMANO
The story of Gina by Loredana De Pace
http://www.artapartofculture.net/2015/03/21/la-storia-di-gina/
Refer to:
leoscagliarini@hotmail.com
loredanadepace@gmail.com
Gina Alessandra Sangermano was a
photographer, artist, a strong-willed woman, a free and creative spirit, full
of inventiveness and joy of life. Even
complicated, demanding, dichotomic, beautiful and gloomy in her solitudes as
explorer of the human soul.
It was, because Gina is no longer
there: cancer has inhabited her and then –
despite her tireless struggle – killed itself in 2007, taking her away.
Despite that, present time remains
obligatory for Gina. Because with her photography, art,
thoughts noted down on her many diaries, written with decisive hand and fast
gesture, with her photography courses organized as teacher and addressed to
people in need and to women, with the darkroom in which she used to get lost
during her experiments, with the reportage of her beloved Calabria, the
portraits of her loved ones and of herself, the nudes shot in detail under a
Caravaggio-like light that left no space to lies, with Polaroids as track of
her journeys, Gina has made impossible its task to death.
I “knew” this artist seven years
after her death, thanks to an act of love of her husband Leo, who sent to me
the following e-mail some time ago:
Hi, my name
is Leo Scagliarini, I live and work in Rome (…). I am looking
for a professional, who could follow a process of evaluation, cataloguing,
collecting and value the photographic material of Gina “Alessandra” Sangermano,
born in 1966 in Bisignano, a small village in Calabria, in the Cosenza
province, who died when she was 40 years old in Rome, in July 2007.
Gina, my
wife, moved to Rome in 1986 to study psychology, but soon photography, as a job
and as continuous search activity, became her passion. Gina's brief
existence in life was focused on a search activity in many other fields beyond
photography: artistic installations, design,
lamps, raku ceramics, reuse, writings….
During her
life, Gina neither exhibited her photos, nor valued her works. After her
death, I collected with passion and care her various tracks, until now just her
photographic material: negatives, positives, digital
photos, prints, Polaroid, microfilms, by scanning and trying to organize part
of such huge material that is invaluable
to me: at present about 6600 files. I am writing
to you, therefore, looking forward to get a reply. Thanks for your attention!
Kind
Regards. Leo Scagliarini”.
First steps: Maybe Gina
would have entitled with these words this first chapter of the story.
The first steps in Gina’s
photographic story, indeed, have taken place after the above e-mail and my answer
to it, through a series of meetings, during which Leo showed me a rather messy
sample of the huge amount of pictures taken by Gina. First of
all, in fact, we had to consider if it would have been really worth to enter
into the analysis and filing stage of her photos.
And it was exactly in such chaos of
black-and-white creased prints, full colour photos and jpeg files viewed on a
PC, that I discovered Gina, her painful beauty, her angry grace, her lightness
engraved in Polaroid colours, the journeys, the faces, the places – many – of
her brief life, the family habits, the inevitable anthropos, the neo-realistic black-and-whites: they were all there, in the magma of her works, of her
life.
How to organize them? Starting to look at her photos one by one.
By looking and looking again at the
pictures on the PC monitor, I had two objectives: to select the best pictures and, at
the same time, to free myself from the fascination that affected me when I
listened to the story of this woman, in order, instead, to strictly get in tune
with her story as photographer, by reaching the point to even blame her for
some technical flaws, in case I would have found frequent ones, as though she
would have been in front of me for a portfolio reading: By observing
the pictures, I observed such anomalies – out of focus photos, inclined
horizons – but they were not due to incompetence, rather to the hurry of
shooting, to the constant urge to communicate through photography and,
therefore, to be there.
Little by little, Gina's messy
archive started to take form in an articulated way, thanks to a partition of
her photos into folders, each of them containing pictures related to a main
topic of Gina’s photographic life, some macro-categories of action, which are
1) Between earth and sky: Calabria and self-portraits
2)
Nude
3) Conceptual photography / (true and
false) errors
4)
Portraits
5)
Anthropos: the Social
Landscape
6)
Polaroid
Each folder contains, furthermore,
two sub-folders: one with strictly selected pictures,
the other with second-level photos, good but not too much, in other words.
At the end
of each week, during the months of work that such filing requested, a phone
talk with Leo allowed me to take stock and realize the state-of-the-art of my
work, to report to Leo the job done and, above all, to exchange ideas, points
of view and observations on what I discovered time after time about Gina.
Genesis of Vi presento Gina (I introduce to you Gina)
One day the phone rang: it was Rossella Viti, director, photographer,
teacher, “having a smattering of
languages”, as she said of herself, co-director of the Verdecoprente residences
in festival (http://verdecoprente.com), an event dedicated to all-round art
languages, from theatre to dance and photography. During
our talk, she proposes to me to “occupy” a space in the framework of the
festival. From this call originated, therefore, the idea of
a performance – between a front
exhibition and theatre dimension – in which to present Gina through a series of
elements: first of all her photographs along with the expressive
power of her writings, but above all her voice. Indeed,
at the end of Vi presento Gina – as
we called the performance – is Gina self who talks to the present audience
through an audio recorded during her struggle against cancer.
This hybrid
performance has allowed us to bring Gina in different Italian cities:
after the “première” at the Verdecoprente Festival (September 2014), the Perugia Social Photo Fest hosted her during the opening night in
November 2014. 2014 ended with the Photolux Festival in the city of Lucca, which hosted Gina and her
photos during one of the Leica talk organized in the framework of the Lucca
festival.
Gina's future.
We wondered
about the will of this bashful woman, full of initiatives but terribly reserved,
who at the end of her existence on earth, answered to her husband's question
about what do of her photos: “non
fare niente” (do not do anything)…
We wondered
if it was right to keep on telling about her.
Gina wanted
to tell about herself, but with an expressive urge that seems inconsistent with
a matter of fact: during her life she never wanted to
exhibit. For what reason? We will never know the answer with certainty but, like
the extraordinary personality of Vivian Maier, also Gina experienced her necessity
with shyness, as she was completely focused on the production, in order to
express herself and help others through photography.
Therefore,
showing her pictures, telling about her thoughts today has an important aim: to follow-up what she started, to share the world of images as a
generous comfort to the eyes and the minds of anybody who experiences
photography as a mean of resilience, of reluctance to give oneself up to the
high waves of life.
“Gina enriches whoever gets in touch with her”: This has been the most important feedback ever
received after the presentations held up to now. For this reason, even she, although reluctant, would
have probably kept on telling about herself.
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https://www.mixcloud.com/kodachrome-radiobarrio/kodachrome-del-19112015/
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https://www.mixcloud.com/kodachrome-radiobarrio/kodachrome-del-19112015/
http://www.photoluxfestival.it/images/Talks/2014/VI_PRESENTO_GINA_narrazione_per_voce_e_immagine.pdf
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