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ARTFAQ.it Interview to Sandro Santioli

Duty question: how did you approach photography?
When I was a student at the Lyceum of Siena, I went along the marvellous countryside of Val d’Orcia many times in a year. Depending upon the season and light, the colours of the fields changed and the mix of colours, lights and the shapes of the sweet waves created always new enchantments. I desired to collect the beauty inside those landscapes and to keep those moments for ever. If I had been able to paint, I think I ‘d have tried with painting. Here, I think, was born my passion for photography.

Are there photographers you think of as your teachers? How did they affect you?
As for the photographers who affected me, I certainly feel like mentioning Weston, for his aesthetic pureness, the formal research, the capacity to find beauty in everything. Ernst Haas for the colour. He was the first great photographer who fully expressed himself with colour. Gifted with a rare sensitivity and elegance. Beside him I’d put the friend-teacher Jay Maisel. He certainly affected a generation of colourist photographers. His career is very very long and his desire to photograph still enormous. Among the Italians, for resemblance the friend Franco Fontana: in landscape he created his style. But his research went quite further than landscape. Of Mario Giacomelli I like the dry, severe, essential style. He was a man who worked to his projects for years. He found a tuning with the subjects he painted, he loved dialogue, the deepness of relationship. He was not only a photographer, but also a poet and a simple man. But I should mention many others...

You have been, and you are, a photoreporter for glamorous magazines, photoeditor and editor on your own in the tourist area. What experiences affected your approach to the more strictly artistic activity?
Our life is a hoard of experiences and in this sense everything interlaces. I always bring with me the sensitivity I have acquired by making a certain kind of job. To answer this question, I’d say that before was born the necessity to “capture” images for my personal pleasure, to satisfy a particular need of mine and then, as time passed, I was able to adapt my photographic “ability” to different jobs and aims.

What do you think is the basic difference between photojournalism and the artistic research by the use of photography?
They are two different areas and approaches. They were born with different needs and the photographer starts from this presupposition. Photojournalism is the witness of an existing reality and though the photographer interacts and records that reality with his own sensitivity and narrative capacity, the “document” must be clear, communicative, informative. On the contrary, in the artistic research there’s no limit to creativity, to the use of photography and to the next interventions. The photo answers only to the creative and expressive need of the person that produced it. Here the subject is not simply reproduced, but it is recreated in a completely new dimension than our own.

You travel for work all over the world. Does the eye with which you photograph the different places change in function of the object, or do all your clicks reflect a personal poetic of yours?
Everywhere in the world there are many “variables” that have to be combined together: people, lights, colours, weather conditions, emotional situation, secular traditions to consider, etc... In these situations I try to perceive the subject, according to my own vision, and I concentrate upon it. In this way I look around myself and consider the environment, lights, shadows, people, movement, colours... and I begin to select in my mind. The resulting photo is a “synthesis” of this process...

You are photoeditor of the portal “Terra di Toscana” ( “Land of Tuscany”), a region where you were born and where you still live. One of the most famous and photographed lands in the world: is it still possible to narrate it through images without falling into common place?
There’s always place for creativity and for personal interpretations. Today the taste of the great audience has evolved, and that’s why it’s possible to propose photos with a new cut and new subjects. It’s sufficient to think about the use of image elaboration programs, about the creative use of movement, of the out of focus, colour, image cut, extreme focuses and so on... In short, there is, and there will always be, place for the new generations of photographers, who want to re-interpret already known places, situations, landscapes or architectures.

You are one of the most important collaborators of the photojournalistic Agency Grazia Neri in Milan. What do you think is the role of photography in the global communication? How has it changed in comparison with the great times of the Capitals as Robert Capa?
The use of images has been growing up in an exponential way in the last 10/15 years, above all with the coming of internet. Magazines too give more and more place to photos, both as number and as dimension. Services are sometimes only photos with the addition of great explanations, that are prepared by the editorial staff: that’s why it must have always a better and better preparation degree. Maybe once photographers were more in direct contact with magazines. Today fast all the photography market passes through Agencies. Anywhere it’s extremely easy to buy and publish images, anyone may be the author. In such a quick and dynamic world the most important thing for a photographer is to be present and well visible.

Which direction will your artistic research take in the future?
It’s hard to answer this question with certainty. I don’t take photos exclusively of landscapes and nature, even if they represent, let’s say, my “first love”, beyond an important vein of research. For a very long time my interest has been broadening to other themes: architectures, portraits, colour research, nude... And as I have been going forward in these directions, I have found a bond, a ground unity in the themes that have been faced... and that’s why I have always been stimulated towards new projects.

Can the show at the Hilton Hotel in Milan be considered an effectual sinthesis of your career?
The show at the Hilton Hotel in Milan represents, for the quality of supports and materials, as well as the dimension of the prints, which were made by Epson with next generation printers, papers and Ultra K3 inks, a sort of “temporary aim” of my work on landscape. It hasn’t the dimensions of the great personal at the Scavi Scaligeri in Verona in 2003, but it’s certainly representative, in consideration of the care and the attention with which it has been prepared and made ready by my agency Grazia Neri and by me, of my interpretation way of colour in landscape.

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