About This Project

Gabriele Fossi

Ad Lucem

Light is the fundamental element of photography, its raw material. However photosensitive a material may be, no photograph could exist without light. Since the early experiments of Niepce and Fox Talbot, photography has been based on the capacity of certain materials to react to light sources by recording an image of them. The valence and dignity of this raw material became the elements of study in my work. If it is through the manipulation and control of light sources that the photographer is able to give shape to his ideas I asked myself how could I make this light the very creator of its own art, the protagonist of the process of creation. I’m therefore willing to step aside, leaving my role as creator and playing the role of spectator. Now I get rid of the camera, I leave all automatism and all manual settings, I need only a photosensitive medium and a light source to hit it. My photos will not be taken, I will simply take what light wants to offer me. Without the intrusion of a camera, I let it draw its shapes on the self-developing Polaroid film. Once it had developed in front of my eyes, I searched among the pictures for those that could best communicate, thus I composed polyptychs. The result is a group of images that speak of light, with light, for light. A set of windows on a world other than our own, a cosmos that seems to bridge two distant realities. One is the world of the real, tangible and known, on the other side an invisible realm, home to a mystery that lies behind light itself and that only light can reveal. The most important revelation, however, remains that, even free from the reins of accurate photographic settings, light is capable of bringing art into our world.

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