Lhe images are stories and if you know how to tell stories, they become images, journeys, inspirations.
With an extraordinary game of roles, word and photography pass the baton of suggestion and, even if they don’t always admit it, they love each other. Today, more than ever, they are a de facto couple, thanks to podcasts and our new habits marked by devices.
A photo, a story is a podcast series – for now six episodes but a sequel is expected – which, starting on January 19, offers a photo, a story in fact, every fortnight. Produced by Contrasto and storielibere.fm, conceived and created by Alessandra Mauro, artistic director of the Forma Foundation for Photography and editorial director of Contrasto editore.
For those who have not yet listened to them, you can start from the third episode, which has just been released, which faces the portrait of Gordon Parks to Muhammad Ali, an opportunity to listen to not one, but two extraordinary lives, between racism and redemption. In the first episode instead, starting from the portrait of a magnificent Audrey Hepburn in one of the most famous costumes in the history of cinema and fashion icon in the film my fair lady, we cross the life of Sir Cecil Beaton, an eclectic and creative viveur who from commissions for Vogue to portraits of English royalty, he knew how to live and beautifully represent his time. Among the episodes already online, the second is dedicated to Militia Of Robert Capa and the mysteries of the most controversial photography in history, still today 80 years after its creation.
The other three episodes, released fortnightly on the best known podcast platforms, will be dedicated to the Afghan girl by Steve McCurry, the metaphysics of Marina di Ravenna by Luigi Ghirri and the kiss of the Hotel de Ville by Robert Doisneau, the queen of quintessential icons.
We asked Alessandra Mauro the reason for this series and something more personal about her relationship with photography.
Alessandra Mauro in a portrait by Marco Rapaccini
Where did your interest in photography come from?
There have been signs that have shown me this path: while I was studying literature I had a passion – I still am – for geographical maps and travel memoirs and photography is travel. After graduating and staying in Bangkok, Paris and Washington, back in Rome I started working for a glossy and elegant magazine, Sfera. There, working in the editorial office, I began to learn about images and their importance.
Contrasto, at the time a photographic agency, was the preferred supplier I turned to to enrich the pages with visual content. It didn’t take much time to fall in love and understand that here I could do things that an agency didn’t do at the time: books and exhibitions. Thus began the adventure.
It was the mid-90s the analog era was passing the baton to the digital one and the millennium ended with the explosion of the web. The Contrasto publishing house was born with you. In these years you have done many things: you teach, curate exhibitions, edit books. What are you really passionate about photography?
The thing that fascinates me the most is the story. I always start from the image: I like the narrative dimension of this language, its potential to tell stories.
Neuroscientists have recently informed us that hearing and vision are the two senses we use the most. This well explains the success of podcasts. And in this series: A photo, a story, there is the synthesis of our favorite senses, hearing and sight, how was it born?
A photo, a story is a co-production Contrasto and storielibere.fm: they asked me to try making a podcast. I like storytelling, I love the radio with which I have the opportunity to collaborate, I like speaking and listening. So I tried to write these first six episodes: each starts from an often known and iconic image but not always. I try to decline them by broadening the narrative: an icon like Steve McCurry’s Afghan girl is the starting point for talking about photography and travel, a combination as old as photography itself. I tried to create a balance between familiar images and lesser ones like the first one that opens the series: Audrey Hepburn photographed by Cecil Beaton in the My Fair Lady dress. Normally it is not identified as fashion photography but in this case I approached it this way, telling the author and her crazy life.
The wealth of details and anecdotes makes us think that you have studied a lot by doing real research.
Yes, I worked really hard on it. I want to talk to those who don’t know photography or know little about itor. For me, the popularizing intent of this initiative was immediately clear. I drew on my teaching experience: explain to someone who knows absolutely nothing about a given subject and in an instant discovers the power of photography to spread knowledge. I went looking in the books, finding anecdotes: it was a work of analysis and above all of synthesis. From the particular to the universal, short lessons that transversally touch on customs, society, culture by linking details, revealing small stories to breathe an era, a place and learn a little more about contemporary history.
In these period frescoes you have carefully avoided touching the private lives of the artists. Yet there would have been something to say about Cecil Beaton, not to mention Robert Capa.
True, I have tried to avoid gossip and also speculation. What do we know if Robert Capa really suffered for Gerda Taro (the photographer, his partner and companion, who died in Spain in an accident at the age of 26 during the Civil War)?
You’re right, but the audience you’re addressing may not know that Bob Capa, the most fascinating photographer in history, always had a rather serious and long relationship with Ingrid Bergman, the legend.
You’re right, I actually could have said that.
Robert Capa is the author of one of the most controversial images in the history of photography: the militiaman who falls and is shot to death. Its authenticity was questioned for many years – not least because the film was never found. Was it the result of the skill of a great reporter or was it artfully constructed? In the dedicated episode it seems that you take the version of his authenticity for good.
He’s so strong that I think he fully deserves to be in this series. Each photograph is a document and as such can be falsified but today we know the origin of that image thanks to the recent discovery of the audio of a radio interview Robert Capa 1947: the photographer didn’t point at the subject, he put the camera over his head and shot. It is a statement worthy of Capa: one of the greatest icons of the 20th century was shot like this, fortuitously. Yet, despite the mysteries and revelations, this image of the militiaman remains a very strong icon that contains the echo of theecce homo of so much representation or that of Deposition of Jesus and many other images of surrender, of human transience. A lot of war photography was inspired, and I think it is still inspired today, by that image.
Don’t you think that today it would be impossible to make the Militia? The photographic production is inexorable and rampant, wars and, more generally, world events, are hyper-represented. Think of the case of George Floyd, the African American man brutally killed by the Minneapolis police in 2020: the testimony is entrusted to the frames of an anonymous video that nails the policemen to the responsibility of a murder that lasted eight minutes. Today we are all potentially witnesses and producers of icons. What about copyright images? They are no longer necessary for the information that fishes everywhere on the net while seeking redemption in collecting and more generally in the art market. What icons will we have in the future?
I believe that a certain type of photojournalism, the classic one to be clear, will always reach the art market. Imagine if today we rediscovered the negative of militia, it would be a great scoop and also a purchase for the market since it is a document. It is as if we were finding unpublished letters from Winston Churchill: they are rare documents and that is why they have value. Contemporary photographic production is very oriented towards creating gods photographic tableau, winking at the art market and generally pushing photography on the interpretative side. Today’s reporters face the war in a completely different way than Capa might have faced it 80 years ago: they go to Ukraine already thinking of having an exhibition.
But it is a widespread trend if even Sebastião Salgado, famous and award-winning interpreter of the great questions of humanity, makes his most famous images, including those of the terrible famine of the Sahel 1984, precious platinum prints for sale at Sotheby’s. It makes us think that photojournalism, orphaned by the great world press, its first client, is struggling in pursuit of the attribution of an artistic and commercial value to every tragedy on the planet.
It is not easy to understand the current mechanisms of the art market.
Let’s go back to the podcast series, you’ve mixed very different photographs together. Explain the criterion.
I would say that in this first series I have put together three iconic photos: the militiaman, the Afghan girl by Steve McCurry and the kiss by Robert Doisneau, alternating them with less known and less obvious images if you will: the image of My Fair Lady by Cecil Beaton, if it is true that he is a fashion icon, on the other hand is not so well known and above all few know that he, Beaton, was also the costume designer of that film and others, winning no less than two Oscars. The other less famous image is that by Gordon Parks of Muhammad Wings whose episode has just been released on podcast platforms and finally Luigi Ghirri, master of Italian photography, the author who forever changed the story of the territory and the very concept of landscape. Starting from him, I was able to really broaden the discussion by talking about the group of painter photographers of the Caffè Greco or the first photography of Rome. We are in the Bel Paese, it is our condemnation and our beauty to live in such an observed and represented place. It is important to understand how to observe it, this was Luigi Ghirri’s great lesson.
In the end, these first six episodes are stories of photos dedicated to a very heterogeneous public who can no longer see photography as just the images of newspapers and pixels or that of museums and galleries which in our country are struggling to find an audience if the authors are not already known. Despite this, photography is increasingly a language to know and love.
Many photos are therefore welcome for many stories to discover the world of yesterday and today.
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