:::images from borders:::

 

A challenge, the choice among the photos from a year that has been a rainbow of mixed moods and feelings.

A staff made of enthusiast and friendly organizers, and a gallery in the heart of London.

Anger, Happiness, Enthusiasm, Sadness and more have mixed up into thousands of photos, all of them shot in 2011, and have produced the final choice of the ones that will be exhibited at the Vibe Gallery from March 1st to the 10th, thanks the organization of Art Caffe London.

Ten days in London to tell moods and feelings that produced five images. And new emotions.

Tags: Art, events, exhibition, feeling, London, photography

Some years are remembered better than others. Some defining moments stay for life, and unsurprisingly, they are often not the most important ones.

Year 2011 has been filled with events, and at the end of it, the ones that brought unbearable happiness were the saddest ones, and the most difficult moments are revealed to be the ones that can be remembered with a sense of triumph. Physical pain and sense of pleasure abounded, in 2011, and though at the end of the year, both seem to be only part of a dream.

Dreams came true, in this year, but the solid reality upturned their matter, and the most colorful dreams were revealed to be nightmares, while the grey ones brought with them the strength to change every betrayal into a victory.

Old friends returned, new ones came and faded, and still without the support of many, nothing good could be done. Many photos have been shot, many stories have been told, and many more just imagined, and the most meaningful ones will be shot in the next year.

For any fulfilled promise, many vows are betrayed and forgotten, but every good moment seemingly coming out of the blue, has been built on a pile of disappointments, broken dreams, pain and sorrow, and failed projects. So none of them has been useless. There is an image for each of them, and all together they make months, and a year, in a life. And the meaning of it can only be clear after while.

I wish you a meaningful year 2012.

 

Tags: new year, photography, screensaver, wallpaer

“Slow Food” is a non-profit international organization which aims to recover the value of typical food and to make fine eating popular beyond the gourmet circles.

Obviously, food products are produced by land or sea, and to reach the tables they need to go through long paths. “Slow Food” makes sure that these paths are not weird or winding, for the quality is really protected only through the safeguard of profitability of traditional process.

Traditional processing of typical food include the whole supply chain, as short as possible, concurring to the production.
The fishing boats were the backbone of traditional coastal fishing, the one that should be revitalized for a sustainable exploitation of the oceans. The small wooden boat yards of traditional boat wrights, in some countries like France, are carefully treasured, but in Italy they are agonizing, reduced to a handful, surviving making restoration and repairs.

The “Boat’s History” has been the tale of the way two boat wrights, refusing to disappear, to yield to bureaucracy, to regulations considering wood shavings as “special waste”, to the market favouring boats looking like marine cars, that held their heads up again and rebuild “a boat like the old times’ ones”.

The “Slow Food” convivium of the Sorrentine Peninsula could not ignore this story, and to celebrate the organization’s 25th anniversary has organized a sea crossing, with a boat rally headed by the “Santa Maria del Lauro”, sailing from a coast to the other of its area, ending at the Restaurant “La Torre”, in Massa Lubrense, where the King of Naples Joachim-Napoleon looked at his troops recapturing Capri and defeating the British army, headed by Hudson Lowe, which would have been sent, disgraced, to command a garrison on another island: St. Helena.

It has been a nice day of celebration, honoring the boat wrights and their art, and the traditional products of their land.

Tags: "Slow Food", "typical food", artisans, boats, boatwrights, carpenters, celebration, craftsmanship, events, exhibition, Sorrento, story of a boat, tradition

 

The Sea is often cited as immutable, in spite of its volubility. Sea is eternal, and Civilization, risen on the sea, has always been based on skills and resources as immutable as the sea itself..

Thousands of generations have strenuously grabbed the secrets of fishing, of boatbuilding, of navigation. And thousands of generations have jealously saved and passed each other through hard training the secrets to make a living by the sea.

But at Sea, like on earth, industrial models for mass production have been imposed, and through the XXth century have upturned the world of fishing, a world used to survive, unprepared to manage resources ever considered unlimited.

The result has been devastating. Fleets of industrial fishing boats have swept away the tiny family owned coastal fishing boats, turning fishermen into salaried crew members, and then depleted the fishing stock to the pint that fishing is now a losing enterprise, unprofitable without the heavy government incentives it keeps getting.

The cultural “genocide” of coastal communities, effectively fulfilled by property speculation and tourism “development”, could be irreversible, as well as the loss of a source of food that until the ’70′s was talked about as the solution to the worldwide problem of famine.

Now we have learnt from our mistakes, and the development model that has proved wrong and disastrous for us and for the planet that sustain our lives, must be discarded. Fish farming and sustainable, selective fishing are the new ways to bring Sea and fishing back as resources. But it is easy to see that they are long known ways, and to realize that the most effective way to enter the future is to learn from the ways of the past. The small coastal fishing, that has always been a mere subsistence economy, is now a model of environmentally sustainable development, a possible source of financial and occupational growth for myriads of family level micro enterprises. Fish farming, tightly ruled and managed, can provide great quantities of fish for food and trade, as required by the modern market, giving relief to the oceanic fish stock while developing a new fishing model that could exploit them more rationally than the one who ravaged the oceans for a century.

The “Settimana Europea della Pesca”, from June 4 to 12, 2011, has involved more than 100 environmentalist groups in a series of events, to make the public aware and call European Union to a new fishing management policy.

In Italy, beside the press coverage of the topic, the association Marevivo has organized a photographic exhibition and an evening of music and cuisine on a barge moored on the Tiber river, in the heart of Rome. I took part to it with pride, meeting a constructive and enthusiastic atmosphere, with wonderful and tireless people, fully aware that they can build the future.

Tags: boats, environment, events, exhibition, fishermen, fishing, photography, Sea

Tags: Art, events, exhibition, London, photography

The Nazi regime wanted to establish a state based on purity of race: many illustrious scientific studies, in the time of Colonialism, explained and justified the superiority of some nations on others with the level of “racial purity” of the peoples.

It was easy to single out, in the German people, the “different” ones, that with their “weakness” or treachery had caused defeat and decadence, so a century of antisemitism exploded into the Kristallnacht, and the Shoah began.

But in addition to the different ones, there were the invisible ones, the untouchables. For a cruel irony of History, they were even more “Aryan” than the Germans, so the regime was forced to modify its racist theories, inventing a “racial decadence” due to the style of life, and as soon as they had arranged it, the extermination of “Gypsies” began.

Shoah, in Hebrew, means “calamity, catastrophe”. Roma and Sinti people call what happened to them “Porajmos”, a word that means “devouring”.
The extermination was absolute, ferocious: in many countries Rom and Sinti populations were annihilated, everybody murdered, from he first old man to the last baby.

I often asked to myself what would I do if I lived in the ’30′s Germany. I do not know, yet, but now I know how it had to feel like to watch helpless the first steps of the Extermination, with a difference: who watched helplessly in the ’30′s, could be afraid of the way it would have ended, but he could not know for sure. We now know it.

In Italy, press campaigns, instigation to hatred, unbelievable statement by politicians and officials at any level, have instigated many true pogrom, in addition to the media ones, against a people whose only fault is to belong to a minority. A furious Tiziana Maiolo, at a fashion show in Milan, where a designer presented a collection inspired by tzigan models, declared that she would take him personally to visit Rom encampments, to see the “reality”, feeling no shame that citizens are left living in such conditions. In Italy the life expectancy of a Rom person is 40 years: like during the Porajmos.

Pointless demagogy depict them as living out of theft and delinquency: reliable statistics, on the contrary, tell that, in spite of the tragic life conditions, criminality rate among the citizen of Roma ethnicity is not different than the “other” Italians’ one, of similar economic and social condition. And to whom blabs about children exploitation, is very easy to reply: the unemployment rate of the young beggars’ parents is extremely high, and given discrimination and lack of incentives and relief that these kids suffer at school, they will probably not have better chances than their parents…

Rom and Sinti were traditionally metalsmithes, renowned for the copper pot production and repairing, beside the sale of hand made cheap jewellery. The modern rules for craftsmen, conceived for shop bound workers, were devastating for them.
Populist and demagogic politicians, that need to foment hatred to remain in power, attack them routinely. We will never be able to know how many of the fires of Rom camps have been caused by Molotov cocktails thrown by hooligans, that to have fun go to burn kids alive, but we know that Italian police, unable to identify the arsonists, charge the survivor for “abandoning” the victims, escaping the fire.

Romanì culture survive in other countries, from Turkey, where musicians at wedding parties are traditionally Rom, for good luck too, to the Balkans, to the Mitteleurope. Italy, it’s losing another piece of the culture that made it. But to stay indifferent, to stay silent now means to be accomplices of the white genocide happening before our eyes.

Tags: ethnic cleansing, genocide, history, pogrom, rom, Roma people, Romani people, tolerance, tragedies

They say that an image, a photograph, says more than a hundred words, and that is true.

But what it does say, as in every art, it’s up to the beholder. Every message, every tale is interpreted by who receives it, who processes it in the way he prefers. Because of this, art prescinds from the medium used by the artist, and glides into sensorial perception. And because of this, communication by images is so prone to manipulation.

Being it advertisement, journalism, entertainment, every image that is not merely fine art is prone to be exploited or twisted.

We live in a world where our sight is bombarded with images of any kind from awakening to sleep, even milk boxes, bus sides, official letters saturate us with images supposedly funneling our attention.

But our attention span is limited. The written words, being abstract, force us to elaboration, even only to translate a word into a thought, and the thought into an image. Information obtained through images are absorbed without filtering, amassed passively pending assimilation.

Once being used to accept a passive behavior in front of information, maybe only out of tiredness, we turn incapable of elaborate the facts suggested to us. So we end up to select facts according to our own opinions, but opinions shaped before elaborating information, can only be prejudicial.

As a photographer, after avoiding for years to be involved in “politics”, I cannot be unaware of the damage that this careless usage of images is causing to civilization. I think to the Romani People, to the anti islamic prejudices, but to Naples too, and how much it has been damaged by the mythology of illegality built by Neapolitans for years.

This website, like my job, will keep being based upon the photos and videos I shoot, but will be mostly a blog, with more frequent posts about what I do and what I think, for words and images should be delivered together, to tell stories that take us back to thinking.

Digisea.it will not be updated any more, but a selection of posts I find still interesting are available here, in the category “Digisea.it archive”. Photostories will keep publishing photos only, with the comments left up to visitors.
And to avoid any doubt: ALL the photos, ALL the videos and ALL the texts, except the few ones clearly labeled otherwise, have been shot or written by me, and are © piero castellano 2011, except when labeled as c/c.
This is for the ones, usually friends and especially relatives, but even customers, that send comments like “Wonderful, those photos of yours, but who shot them?”
Now, I hope to tell new stories, soon. The travel goes on.

Tags: communication, photography, Piero Castellano, words

Long time ago, in 1936, a young navy reserve officer was called at war.
The war was a shameful, unjustified act of aggression against a poor African country.
The officer disliked the government that had brought his country to war, but it was his country, and he had sworn to serve it. He like many others did not feel that war as especially unfair, as it was, because he was a son of his times, and was taught that European countries waged war in Africa to spread civilization. So, he served with honour on war ships, escorting cargoes loaded with weapons and troops to ravage the lands of Ethiopia, in a dishonourable colonial war in decolonisation time. The British Empire was being shaken by the moral strength of a half naked Indian little bald man with eyeglasses, but did not even bother to forbid the passage of Suez to the aggressor’s ships.
So the officer’s ship did not fire one shot, and he was soon back to his already growing family.
But for a short time: only four years later, the same officer, back in the navy again, had just sorted out of a shelter after a heavy bombing in Tobruk, when an aide reached him handing a cable.
He would not have been there. For the third time in five years, the country was at war: the government he despised was allied with the barbaric Nazis, and he felt from the very beginning that it would have meant the destruction of his country.
But when he read the cable, the World War lost any importance, for he had just become father for the fourth time. He looked at the devastated battlefield, saw the sunken ships in the harbour, and mentally promised to his newborn daughter and his beloved wife that he would have survived.
Later, after he survived the war, he got to know more of the horrors and lies about the wars he had been involved in. He cursed the regime that had stained his officer’s pride sending him to loot Ethiopia and to crush democracy in Spain, and felt secretly guilty for the rest of his long life, knowing that shells and mustard gas canisters that killed and maimed Ethiopian men, women and children had been escorted by his ship for a safe passage through the Red Sea.

Half a century and two decades later, I was on another battlefield.
The war was over, but it was still working, like a bullet gone astray. The battlefield was a city so rich with different cultures that people that had none wanted to destroy them to make it “clean”.
And ten years later, people in the city were working hard to forget. Bars and nightclubs were full, and everybody smiled a lot.
Only, on the bars doors strange looking stickers forbad to bring guns inside, and in the discos tough looking bouncers asked kindly to leave “all weapons” at the wardrobe. Nobody older than ten years walked over the grass, ever. Then, in nighttime, in the suburbs, one could still hear and see assault rifles fired in the air, new graffiti on bullet riddled walls promised renewed “cleansing” or revenge for it, and the names of warlords still at large were enough to make smiles disappear, and to attract nervous glances by strangers.
Sarajevo was not a quiet town, long after the war was over.
As it’s usual, after any war, some people had become rich, very rich. Other people, most of the people, spent time and energy to not look poor, but some were too poor even to pretend.
The Roma could be seen everywhere: in elegant streets begging or asking, in the suburbs living in shanties, and in the residential areas going from a garbage bin to the next, often pulling a cart, to collect whatever was still usable or saleable.
And then there were children.
Kids so young to be mere babies, crying or singing unlikely folk songs, or playing with wrecked accordions as big as themselves, kneeled on pavements, often in the pouring rain, begging for coins that were seldom given.
I was there to photograph the life of a city that had reborn after being under siege for four years. I shot at them mercilessly with zooms, defying curses from adults guarding them.

The legend says that photographers steal their subjects’ souls, and certainly I felt like a thief.
Every time I looked back at those photos, I wondered what had ever been of those kids. No harm, but either no good has come to them from being photographed.

Today, 75 years after the navy officer’s story, the photos I shot to the little young Roma kids in Sarajevo, and to the street kids in Istanbul, are being exhibited and sold in an art gallery in New York. The proceeds will finance the foundation “Artists for Charity”, that will use them to help unfortunate children to study and be treated in their orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Rest in peace, dear old captain: all debts are being paid.

“Born Brave”, from February 15th to February 20th, 2011, at Ouchi Gallery, 170 Tillary Street, Suite 507, Brooklyn, New York City, NY.

Tags: charity, children, Ethiopia, exhibition, history, kids, Romani people, Sarajevo, tragedies, war, world war II, WWII

There are cities at the center of strangely attractive forces. The fascination of feelings seemingly inspired by them is exuded by the city themselves, while hidden under a veil of images, quickly turned into cliché.
Barcelona, Naples, Valparaìso, Istanbul: sea cities, historical cities, built by art, by pain, by blood: cities imprisoned inside of their very legend, where people become just shadows on a background that is the real protagonist, and the photographer can hardly focus the depth of the reality in front of his eyes.
It’s not always the history, or the beauty of monuments, or the inhabitants’ kindness to make a city alive.
It’s Istanbul, that was Byzantium, and Constantinople, and the Ottoman capital, and the vibrant Belle Époque city spiced with Orientalism, to give a soul to History, to the monuments, and to people living there.

Tags: black and white, Istanbul, photography, travel, Turkey

A photographer is a witness.
His own opinions, and his own impressions, must be kept in the background of the facts he tells, and they must be told through his own images only. And through my images I try to tell stories about ordinary people, their traditions, ancient memories and artistic suggestions.
But then, times come, as it happened, when emotions or or shame were too strong, times when one can not, and must not, stay silent.
“No man is an island: never send to know for whom the bell tolls”, John Donne said.
We have assisted from our tv sets to genocides and wars, with the uneasyness of who knows that there must be real persons behind the images, but also with the reassuring resignation of who knows cannot change the world. I have met people that had lived those tragedies as part of their lives, and tried to realize what those experiences could teach us. But I tried to tell only what I had seen and heard from the protagonists.
And then something happens, somthing so close, so unbelievable, that it’s not possible anymore to restrain one self to be a simple witness.
In a world where governments bargain “human rights”‘s respect with the “national interest”, the common people’s support has always been a comfort. The only true Right, the right to be able to live with the dignity proper to a human being, is more easily recognized when people doesn’t hide behind flags or uniforms, but can look into each other’s eyes.
The tragedy of Sahrawi people, triggered by colonialism, perpetrated by the last fascist european dictatorship and an absolute monarch, fueled by the vetoes of the very nation that gave the world the idea itself of Human Rights, is downplayed or ignored by national governments, in the name of interests or alliances. But on a local level, at individuals, associations, small or big cities, that tragedy has ignited a solidarity and empathy race. A virtual community, a kind of little UN of individuals, has sprouted, that recognizes to the Sahrawi People the dignity and the richness of its culture, its language, that hosts and instruct its children in friendly towns, in spite of thousands difficulties opposed by the cynicism of national bureaucracies. The Sahrawis are still divided by a wall into two halves, one oppressed and colonized in its own land, the other one confined in the desert and humiliated in the condition of refugees.
But hundreds and hundreds of italian towns have twinned themselves with the Sahrawis’ refugee camps, and they use the twinned towns status to ease the movements of aids and of cultural exchanges, keeping alive the people, their language, their literature, their arts: their very existence, denied by some “national interest”. The Europe of people, the Europe of cities, has mirrored itself into a people living exile and colonization.
And the Sahrawis of the desert, naming each of their camps like one of their occupied towns, have mirrored themselves into the other half of their people and into their desire for freedom.
A small, happy italian town, instead, has been twinned with the invader.
The City of Sorrento has mirrored itself not into the refugee camp of El Aayùn, but with the administration of the moroccan colonies of the occupied city of El Aayùn, that they spell Laayoune.
The United Nations, The International Court of the Hague, the European Union and even Italy itself call for the right of self determination for the Sahrawis. The city of Sorrento, the sole and only political entity in the world, has recognized the sovereignity of a country on a territory that the UN define as “not self governed”, that is to say colonized.
If this move was made by a national government, motivated by a vague and nebulous interest, it would not have been so stunning. But the gesture of a small town, the grain of sand in the clockwork, the beat of a butterfly wing causing a storm on the other side of the world, it’s heavy as a boulder on the cosciences.
The people from “Sorrento”, even those who not vote for Sorrento’s city council, but lives in the Sorrentine Peninsula, cannot stay still and just look how does it goes. They must decide if they want to mirror themselves into the victims, and to offer solidarity, or into the invaders, and to be conniving. There’s no room for compromise when the topic is Human Rights and International Law: the solution is ready, as pointed by UN, taht even has a mission (that includes italian military observers) on location to implement it, and it’s not up to us to solve international disputes.
But, meanwhile, common people can help the common people living in the desert, and learn from them how to save their dignity, that has been humiliated by their administrators’ actions.
“Il Colibrì” will organize some meeting to inform about the situation in Western Sahara, to collect aids to be sent to Sahrawi refugees camps by the common people from Sorrento and the Sorrentine Peninsula. A great chance to show that the people is more sensitive then institutions.

 

photo: Fabrizia Ramondino, during a pro Sahrawi rally in Naples with Abdeslam Omar Lehsen, chairman of the association of relatives of sahrawi victims of human rights violations.

Tags: corruption, Sahrawi, shame, Sorrento, tragedies, twinning