The project Idiot Wind is aimed to mock these photographers who, after putting aside a nice little nest-egg, decide to leave for some poor country to take thousands of pictures of black faces, prematurely wrinkled skind, or, in the best of cases, to try to immortalize the innocent heppiness of a child spashing about in a latrine of a slum in Bombay.
The project Idiot Wind is aimed to tell true stories and to represent reality without invading it, and without producing those “sadistic and third-worldist reportages” that deprive the document of its informative, didactic and ethic value. When a reportage does not inform, when it does not bring to light any unknown political or social issue, but it insists on the same suffering that conventional media like to show, it risks to reveal itself as mere “aesthetics of suffering” both for the photographer and for the public. These kind of pics involves the visceral pleasure of looking at a reportage photo that documents some dramatic event, and considering it as pure art. It means to ignore the main value of that piece of work: its being a Document, which is the only scapegoat that should make a photographer proud of what he has realized, and the spectator proud of what he is observing.
Therefore, I felt the need to write ironic, sometimes grotesquely cruel stories, which accompany the pictures and contribute to represent the accidental and surreal drama of everyday’s life.
The project Idiot Wind is aimed to tell true stories and to represent reality without invading it, and without producing those “sadistic and third-worldist reportages” that deprive the document of its informative, didactic and ethic value. When a reportage does not inform, when it does not bring to light any unknown political or social issue, but it insists on the same suffering that conventional media like to show, it risks to reveal itself as mere “aesthetics of suffering” both for the photographer and for the public. These kind of pics involves the visceral pleasure of looking at a reportage photo that documents some dramatic event, and considering it as pure art. It means to ignore the main value of that piece of work: its being a Document, which is the only scapegoat that should make a photographer proud of what he has realized, and the spectator proud of what he is observing.
Therefore, I felt the need to write ironic, sometimes grotesquely cruel stories, which accompany the pictures and contribute to represent the accidental and surreal drama of everyday’s life.