M10: Bruno Giliberto

We present the M10 of Metalibro’s collection, an issue dedicated to a selection of pho- tographs by Bruno Giliberto that combines images from analog technologies as well as digital ones. These photographs are not displayed randomly, as every issue it has a narrative that can be read in multiple ways as we turn every page. Among the different understandings that have come to me, the idea of the sacred shows itself with enthusiasm. And as a reader of photographic images, I can not let go of my mind a constant worry: that of time. That is why I read the sacred time of stopping as if just before opening this book everyone had been running for something profane. Photographs, as if they were the product of a spell, have captured something as to not let it escape never again. I will not say that they have captured reality, because in and of itself reality is ungraspable and mobile, and in no case true. Nevertheless, we can say that one of the aspects that make photography so mysterious is that we can comprehend it as a sign of the time, that encapsulates and simultaneously marks it.

Stopped for a moment, there is no transit in those images, there is only an interruption in the becoming and in the waiting, even if that waiting is tiny. Until, shortly after the middle part of this Metalibro, Giliberto offers to us two people running in the green grass turning their backs to us, escaping from us. Reinforcing the sense of waiting by the opposition on the following page we stop again, connecting our contemplation with the one that was made by the photograph. It is maybe because we are constantly mo- tivated to go full speed that the uncommon time for stopping is sacred. Even so, there is something familiar in every image that highlights the votive feeling that inspires in us some kind of veneration, but to what? Today, that question seems to have no major importance.

To this humanity, walls and buildings seem to be venerable. Sacred rites to build the human ages. What does every photographed wall hide? What is hidden under those waters in India? How could we access those unclear spaces, how do we get to know what is behind the skin of the wall, inside the wall, inside the ages, in every single body that is displayed in the careful and stopped encounter of the camera, or inside our magnificent Andes mountains that escort an undisturbable woman. It seems to hide the repetition of an entity from the untouchable time, that updates the action in these sacred surfaces and that re-encounters itself with the photograph that seals, that marks and that fixes the same scene. That identity hidden in a spiral inspires our veneration. That sacred time of building and observing the photographic images. Because it is certain that we will never know what is inside those walls, inside that tower, behind that mask, nor we will know what is beneath those waters. So, in every image of this M10, I distinguish a division between what we see and read, and that which we will never be able to access but that amazes us. that seems quotidian, but also mysteriously trapped and intangible.​