It is not easy to explain what exactly this curious work in progress is;
neither illustration nor reportage, neither electronic processing nor direct photography.
It produces black and white photographs in panoramic format, stretched a little on the cinemascope horizon,
giving the idea of realistic photography spread over a surface that has a flavour of the epic or adventure film.
Giuliano Ferrari approaches this series on the myths surrounding Matilde of Canossa more or less as an illustrator
or theatrical designer would have approached the creation of tableaux vivents,
the production of magic lantern slides for a 19th Century sermon on the Via Crucis:
a narrative frame of reference, a scene in mind, and then the choice of figures, spaces and atmospheres
to be used for story-telling purposes. These “Canossian” views, with a story-telling dimension
encapsulated in the individual scenes, may seem to mark a break with Ferrari’s photography as we know it,
apparently derived from an unshakeable faith in the need to recount the real, however crudely;
from the adoption of Magnum-inspired photo-journalism almost as a natural language for sequences and montages.
It may also be a kind of compensation he feels obliged to make,
a verification of the plurality of the possible histories, of the games one may play with reality.
Paolo Barbaro
(photography critic)