Photography by Dido Fontana
Dido Fontana is an Italian photographer. He does not retouch his photos because, as he’s used to say, reality itself is even too interesting. His style has been defined anti-fashion and neo-baroque.The photographer’s recent work is between his solo and group shows in Europe and United States and the commissions he has been given by the world of fashion, communications, and publishing. This is, overall, a wide-ranging production in which two areas, specifically those of creation and commerce, have melded together to allow the emergence of an omnivorous creativity and a strong photographic personality, both with regards to the interpretation of his means and for the definition of his subjects. His last work is called “Amen”. The title is already a promise of a specific landscape. A conceptual allegory that, presented as an attractive provocation, represents desires, ambitions, and the idea of a desire for power that for its very nature needs trust, total acceptance, and continuous fulfilment.
Love, knowledge, enlightenment, emancipation, strenght, control and power. They’re all in “Amen”, your last project. Tell me something about it. When did you think about it? How did you work on it? And when did you realize it was done?
It’s a kind of initiatic training. It’s about the understanding of the Value. It’s about growing and progressing: those are all rings of the same chain. It is a never-ending project that takes shape from a childish reflection that becomes a research and then a visual manifestation of this path; the art installation created for the exhibition at Boccanera Gallery (http://www.arteboccanera.com) is the occasion to define a exact date for a research project that goes on. I speak about the importance of knowing the tools (inner tools and outer tools), I speak about freedom (of thought and language), it’s about the use of personal rituals and about the work necessary to allow the imagination to become action and finally a creation. I see it as a unique work consisting of five unique works: photography, sculpture, graphics, painting, music, to give life to a complete experience.
Your district is in Dolomites.
I was born here and I live here. I can feel at home in many cities of the world but I feel that my god lives on the top of the mountains and he pretends silent.
There’s always something erotic about your pictures.
If it’s there I don’t think about it and I don’t seek it, maybe it’s a consequence. The thing that attracts me is that I prefer to photograph people who have not (yet) acquired the bad habits of the professional models and therefore they are more natural and less calculated.
Eroticism implies a kind of sophistication that bored me: malice, complications and vices are all elements very distant from me, a sort of cultural superstructures that I feel ‘em as unnecessary complexities. Maybe ‘cuz I’m up with all sort of tricks.
What’s beauty to you?
The sunrise.
Text by Daniele Pratolini
Photography Dido Fontana
