THEteacher by vocation, philosopher by training with a degree in aesthetics from the Sapienza University of Rome, Alessia Tagliaventi was born in 1978 even if she has the beauty of a 50’s movie star. Following her vocation she wrote Glance, Photographs do thingsa book that talks about images and teaches children and young people to look at them.
Important and necessary since, among the many subjects that are not studied – and that do not appear in the educational programs – in schools of all levels there is the image and more generally, visual culture. Those born in the new millennium observe and discover the world through images. Photographs and videos are the vehicle of all new media. TV, web, social networks are the new sources of knowledge that passes through our smartphones. The third millennium is a digital world made up of images just a click away. And probably this book, Colpo d’occhio, was born from these considerations. We asked her to tell us the genesis starting from the beginning.
Alessia Tagliaventi, where does Colpo d’occhio come from?
In reality it was born from the passion for books and photography. Put the two together and you’re done. If I think back to where this adventure began, I confess that it all started precisely because of a book.
Alessia Tagliaventi portrayed by Antonio Cama
During my university years they gave me Josef’s book Koudelka, Gypsies. I found it beautiful and among those pages I saw the photograph that is still able to change my mood today: it is a man who seems to be whispering something to a horse. For me it is an image that has an extraordinary poetic force.
In those years I studied to understand, I reasoned about things, the choice to do philosophy and then aesthetics was clearly the desire to deepen, fathom, decode. Then I saw that photograph and I was moved, it impressed me beyond any logical reasoning. There are many more beautiful or more interesting images but that one was special, it animated me, it still animates me today after many years. So I thought that my study to get hold of interpretative keys I could easily apply to visual culture. After university I started working in a publishing house, Odradec; with other colleagues we kept the column of the young critic. Subsequently I won a scholarship for the curatorship of exhibition projects at the Cattolica in Milan. I should have learned to exhibit and instead I fell more and more in love with books.
In these years he discovered his vocation for teaching.
By now photography had become my subject and I realized that teaching was exciting, it really gave me pleasure. Going to schools, prisons or among migrants has become a sort of mission by talking about a subject as familiar as it is unknown: images. Colpo d’occhio, the book, was born from my going around the schools and from the sad awareness that one never teaches to look. In some courses it is called image education but in fact it is about drawing. I think it’s really absurd that in the face of generations born with the language of images, this isn’t an educational subject.
Perhaps it cannot be taught
Sure you can. It is often confused with teaching shooting technique. But I’m talking about visual culture: photography is not a “fact” but an image that needs to be read, understood. It is a universal language, it speaks to everyone, it needs no translation but yes interpretation. We often have a contact with reality mediated by images: shocking, moving, amazing, it is necessary to have the tools to read them, understand them, doubt them if needed and receive the information necessary to understand the complexity of the world. In secondary schools there are two hours a week of teaching history of art that do not contemplate it, after all two hours are not even enough for art. And to go back to the photographic image – the one that fills up the cell phones of young people – acquired or produced, it is not contemplated. I teach history of photography and mass media theory and method at theEuropean Institute of Designn of Rome. Most of my students want to become a photographer, I try to help them structure their passion. They come out of the IED with a real degree, they have to be prepared in a world of images.
Photography today is a widespread social practice. There are excellent examples in your book.
Today we all know how to take pictures and we know how to do it better than in the past. The photographs I chose for Colpo d’occhio are the result of long reflections: the astronaut who takes a selfie in space today does so with greater awareness and with a taste for composition that is certainly more familiar than in the past.
Selfie in spaceAkihiko Hoshide, 2012 © Nasa Photo
And even Naruto, the monkey who smiles in front of the camera before taking his self-portrait, I chose it because on the one hand it is a provocation: “we can all take pictures and we are all aware in front of a lens, so much so that we smile” ; on the other I knew it would capture the attention of the children. Going around the schools to make the book known, when we get to page 76 and she appears, Naruto, a female macaque from Indonesia, the children start screaming, they literally go crazy.
Selfie in the jungleIndonesia, 2011 © David J. Slater
I took a gamble, mixing great authors and apparently simpler or anonymous images but it was necessary for the didactic function I wanted to give to the book. I wanted to show the possibilities of images, their extravagance. And the children answered with curiosity: they want to know everything, they ask for every detail. This is why I have also inserted images that are not real but the result of artifices, like this one by Mario Cresci.
A little earth in heaven, a little heaven on earth, Mario Cresci, 1973 © Mario Cresci
I also wanted to contemplate the fabulous sense of the photographs, their belonging to the world of the imagination, showing their ambiguous power and instilling the doubt of: it will be truewith the hope that they will then apply it as a filter to everything they see without falling into deception.
To choose the images to work on, you entrusted a special consultant
My son Dario, six and a half years old, has been a precious helper. The book is aimed at older children but he and those his age are also passionate about it. And he wanted to actively participate in the choice.
The difficulty of publishing it
I conceived this book even before Dario was born. I asked all the Italian publishing houses, nobody wanted to publish it. Photography for children doesn’t sell, they told me, illustration is better. I’ve always loved picture books and noticed the fact that there was no photography. Since the end of the 70s in Italy it has completely disappeared just as it becomes a mass language. And while the publishing market for children and adolescents literally exploded, the images disappeared. It is a bit as if the publishers were afraid to speak to young people through photography, perhaps confused with the news, with the dramatic facts of current events, with the harshness of reality. I don’t know, it’s a guess, but I think photography is scary. Obviously because we are not trained in image, as we said before. During the long lockdown I closed myself off at the National Gallery of Modern Art which has an extraordinary archive, to do in-depth research on publishing for children and adolescents which confirmed what I thought: from the 70s onwards there was a case in Italy. It didn’t go like this abroad, I am thinking of Tana Hoban’s books in the United States and in Europe, of so much children’s literature that hasn’t canceled the photographs from the narrative. I finally posted with Contrasto, the publishing house with which I have been collaborating for years and for which I have curated many editorial projects. Now things are changing. New projects are emerging and the institutions are aware of this gap. The Mufoco (the Museum of Contemporary Photography) dedicated a conference to the topic. Small steps for great achievements so that today’s children learn to look and tomorrow’s adults are more aware beings.
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