Fulvio Roiter

FULVIO ROITER

Stenio Solinas
.

Venice - The vocations. “on fait toujours la même chose” says the protagonist of 'La condition humaine' by Malraux. We do the same thing all the time, but every time we feel it as different.
“I've been genetically planned to be a photographer,” Fulvio Roiter tells me. “When I was a child I was fascinated by cameras, the Leica, the Contax I saw in the ads of the Vie d'Italia and the Vie del mondo. The first I owned, a present by my father, was a Welt and cost 600.000 lire, the tenth part of the amount you paid a Leica, that was an object of those giving physical pleasure when you had in hands.
I used to take pictures without any logic and technique, with the venter... They say that practices waste eye: you end to see nothing where you live. Maybe, but it is not worthy for me: emotion saves me, I can still be moved, and curiosity: about person, things, landscapes”.
“Being Venice” is the third book Roiter has devoted to the Veneto main town, the first whole in colour. If instead of wasting his time with Toscani, Cacciari had rummaged in the home libraries, he would find what gives fragility and oneness to the town he governs, and condenses grandeurs and evils.
“I think highly of Oliviero Toscani, but you do not see Venice in his advertising campaign. There are two dogs mating, sewer rats... New York too has dogs mating and sewer rats... They say: 'a way to recall problems' Maybe ... sure it is that for me 'the problems' is a word for intellectuals so much in fashion today.
There's an imaginary wool thread, beyond which it is made violence and pain is commercialised. Here it is, for me Venice is a beautiful girl born some centuries ago. A sea girl and so, more photogenic and photographable”.
There's the reverberation, it's sunk in water, there are days of such a transparency... The literal meaning of the word photography is: ' Writing with light'. '
That's what I'm trying to do, to find the meaning through light. Naturally it is not enough the camera: it is not the objective that suggests, it's the that sees and makes it possible the camera obeys, translates what the eye has watched”.
The last book of Roiter, just published, is called “Viaggio Italiano” (Rizzoli), 311 pictures from end to end of the peninsula.
“I had a very good material about Italy, the work of a quarter century of travels. The title explains the choices, it's subjective, and encloses what I've seen. I make tales by images.
I've started as a professional in 1953, I was 27, but for my father it was not a serious work. I made an agreement with him: going for a month to Sicilia to see and take pictures. If from this travel I came out as a photographer able to live from his work, all okay. Otherwise I would resume with hydrocarbons. I delivered my bicycle to Palermo, and I took my hand luggage. I picket my bicycle up at the railway station.
I cycled for two thousands kilometres going around the isle and I took pictures to all it seemed to me photographable. Once back I delivered a selection of them to the “La Guilde de Livre” the Publishing House of Lausanne by then the shrine of the image. I attached a letter plenty of apologies and reserves, you know those letters you write when you are at the beginnings and you believe you are worth a little, but you do not have any proof, nobody believes in you.. For a pair of weeks I was on the look-out for the postal office: “Toni is there nothing for me?” “ Nothing, Fulvio”. Then one day the reply.
I don't remember how it begun: 'Monsieur, vous etes trop modeste'. From then I've not stopped anymore”.
The 'from then I've not stopped anymore' of Roiter means an about thirty books: from the prehistoric engravings of the Valcamonica to the sporting Florence, from the Umbria of St. Francis to the Andalusia of Lorca, Machado, Unamuno, the Venice just below surface and that just below the lagoon or in carnival mask. Without forgetting Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Bruges... For “Ombrie” La terre de San Francois”, his second book, he was awarded with the Nadar Prize for the photography, that in France is as the Goncourt Award for literature and the Strega Award in Italy, when the Strega was still an award.
“Nadar, a genius. His portraits, think about the Baudelaire one, for example. Subjects must keep still for two minutes at least. Try to make somebody poses for 120 seconds, and you'll see what a foolish face it will come out. Instead he dragged out the soul. By then photography was at the beginnings, by now we have very sophisticated cameras and ultrasensitive films by which you can do everything. Notwithstanding, even with a million images a day there is not the Image Nadar succeeded in producing by a pose”
When he was a boy, during war, Roiter has passed through reconstruction and the economic boom, the years of terrorism and the years at the double without too many illusions.
“Half a century of ideology breaks a German, furthermore an Italian. Then there has been the great falsehood of language: nobody has cheated at words as communists did.
The mercenary turning into volunteer, the special detective into councillor, the libertarian reduced to a provoker, who does not agree to a counter-revolutionary. The result: we do not know anymore who we are.
There's welfare, right, but there's not a civil environment making the dignity of a nation. Hence there's the complacency of misery, the cheaply pity, there's vulgarity in human heart, both in individuals and populations. I instead believe in the therapeutic power of beauty, in its thaumaturgical value.
From his house at the Lido where he lives with Louis “Lou” Embo, he beautiful Belgian wife even she a famous photo reporter (the last work: Tremiti, Vianello Editore, text by Tony Damascelli the readers of the Giornale know very well) I leave bringing with me a photo. “Above we talked about practice, about the fact that if you watch always at the same things you don't notice them anymore. ' Belle comme la belle femme des autres' Morand used to say to explain the psychological mechanism it lies over: beautiful as other's beautiful women, you don't not notice yours anymore, she is always in front of us. Well, some time ago I went to Fossalta di Piave where Ernest Hemingway, wounded in the Second World War, was first cured. It's a place I've been a lot of times. This time tulips have opened. I left the house at the background and I focused the flowers. Here, look at it, petals seems blood drops, the blood of Hemingway.
If you like it I'll give it to you”. I've already framed it