Specters

In his series ” Specters ” in 2013, Silvio Galassi does not take pictures, but he makes pictures.

Here, as in the previous series about landscapes, he selects images from a personal archive of negatives bought at a flea market. The creation mechanism is based primarily on the selection of images and then feeds on the revelation / development of the photo as the project evolves.

Where do these portraits come from which are set in a different context allowing thus a new reading ? It does not matter, because what is important to Silvio Galassi, is not the identification of an individual in the photograph, but the revelation of other hidden aspects time has left on their face and picture. Through its developing work and magical process of revelation that follows he pronounces, as Barthes would say in Camera Lucida, the return of the dead. This love for the spectrum, which he shares with Boltanski, is expressed through representations of anonymous portraits which become in our interpretation “a place of transfigured resurrection” to use the formula of Jean-Louis Schefer commenting on the photography of Serrano. The blurred and smeared images of S. Galassi emerge from the depths as mysterious faces and cast a doubt on what we see or maybe only imagine.

Thus, photography, for him, is more than shooting ; it is a process of transformation, where transcription errors and smearing are part of the creation process and contextual re-reading a continuation of the creation process.