Mon Enfance - 2014

I want to focus on a very intimate series, "Mon Enfance". Since the theme of memory is very dear to and I consider it a feeling, I admit that I was impressed by these photographs. The familiar images, taken from the father of the photographer at the time of a childhood that we imagine carefree and unrepeatable, come from super 8 movies, from the small and revolutionary cameras that have had the power to witness and deliver future faces, people and moments of the life of those who, like myself, have been contemporary with the advent of a technology that has been overcome but that during the late sixties and up to the seventies have taken up the highlights of our lives. Umberto Verdoliva has recovered those films, those not attacked irrecoverably by time, he has poured them into a CD, saving them, and has photographed the most significant images. What results from this operation, which has above all the flavor of post-modernity, is a poignant account of a life in which one was rich without being aware of it. A commotion. Sincere, in which the trickle of more than one tear must have come to the photographer's eyes to follow his cheeks. I'm sure. The same happened to me in the presence of family films, whose recovery miraculously exhumed names, faces and episodes too hastily forgotten, pushed into a corner by the pace of life itself. The images we see are nebulous and elusive just as distant memories are, stains waiting to be clarified and lightened by the heavy accumulation of episodes and new experiences that we call life. And it is beautiful and moving the image of a father holding his son in his arms, above, because it must have been nice to see the world from up there. But the photos of "Mon Enfance" are more than a private story, they are the cross-section of a society that, starting from the family, no longer exists and whose memory must be ineluctable like the repayment of a debt. Memory is everything. Man without memory is as if he had never lived. by Giuseppe Cicozzetti on scriptphotography