Francesco Posteraro

(Ri) -Tratto is an ongoing research that began a few years ago: to portray many people while retracting, at the same time, the idea of ​​myself in search of an identity. The evolution of the genre of the portrait in photography teaches that there is a reciprocity between the subject shot and the photographer, and that it is possible to trace characteristics of the author himself in the final image, as if a part of the latter were faithfully reproduced, in quality of visual testimony of the encounter with the other. In this production, the portraiture experience lived by the two actors takes on a new meaning, because it involves a total zeroing of distance and an intrusion of the author into the other’s gaze. Every single image is produced by me, ideally replacing the eyes of all subjects with mine, in an operation of deprivation, which does not result in the prevarication of my point of view on others, but concerns a broader and more complex discourse on search for my identity. The people filmed thus become replicants, multiplications of me, looking towards myself. A courageous act of merging into the other, one in front of the other, very close to a step away from a hug; a continuous questioning fueled by doubts and fears, an obsessive, compulsive and repetitive gesture implemented by the human multitude and directed towards a single imaginative self-portrait with the intention of addressing a warning to abandon one’s point of view, to look at the other and to look at oneself, regaining possession of that authentic attitude, indispensable to fully understand who we are … For me, this is the meaning of the portrait: to tell a new story, never seen. Looking for a precise moment, where the person who is photographed is naked and shows himself completely to tell you an unpublished piece of himself, searching, almost desperately, in her. You have to be there to capture it and make it yours.

(http://www.francescoposteraro.net/)

Location: Turin