When you meet Michele Di Giacomo, it’s easy to see how looking at things and people is for him the simplest and most natural way to have a dialogue with others and with himself.

Glances, pictures, pictures again, situations, facts. What else we should say about his photography other than defining it as an endless observation of the world?

In this persistent gaze flow, sometimes interrupted to take photos, the most impressive aspect is that, between the act of observation and the shooting, Michele doesn’t seem to put any judgment. We rather notice an amazed and curious approach to things as they are but with a photo recording that wants to be offered as a real fact instead of a personal statement.

If the observer gets emotional in front of that quite disarming everyday life, in which the situations seem to have gone through the photographer without (almost) any will on his part, well if this happens, it’s the observer’s “fault”.

I mean, a picture is like a mirror; this is well known. It’s a place where people can only see what they already know, what they have already experienced. Indeed, it’s not possible, with a picture, to retrieve fragments of consciousness and knowledge that do not belong to us. For this reason, a good picture is able to paint emotions with countless nuances in the eyes of different observers.

Now, to follow this thought, Michele, as any photographer, doesn’t know what he is giving to his observers. It’s as if he makes sensitive paper boats and let them go on the calm course of a beautiful river. Who will meet them? If we were the lucky ones, we would know that giving us pieces of world is a gesture full of humility, while opening up to the observer and asking to share of amazement and emotion -no matter what it may be- coming out from meeting reality.

The uniqueness of the snapshot is an important aspect for Michele, and this is a milestone of his art, which supports him in the Bressonian cognitive path of the world. A reality that he wishes to grasp in its full development and which, despite this, does not necessarily lead to surprise but something much more gripping: the tale of the extraordinary everyday life. That is what we have stopped looking at – they say – and to which we attach little importance because we are more focused on what will come rather than on what is happening to us.

A universe of gestures and situations that fulfils the everyday life of each of us.

And besides, this is what some photographers can do better than others: giving us another chance (another and another again) to let us experience the thousand faces of reality.

Simona Guerra

Entelechy of the invisible, in Michele Di Giacomo photography life storytelling is told through virtual cracks and openings on an everyday reality that, seen with the author’s eyes, appear marked by unique and unrepeatable moments.

Michele puts the mind, the eyes, the heart and the Bressanian poetry on the same objective line in order to take pictures that sometimes evoke Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photos only remotely.

The incipit, for example, is frankly inspired by Giacomelli and then we can see other influences, from Doisneau to Sellerio, so to say the whole lesson of the great flâneurs photographers of the last century, which is then the lesson of lightning narrative, made with light and even more with the shadow of what you see but also of what there is not anymore or there is not yet, a “before” and an “after” that photography may not be able to reveal but can certainly evoke.

Is there any Di Giacomo’s way to the invisible?

Certainly we notice that every image is a dense tale, an extemporaneous but complete screenplay, always obtained with just a few essential elements.

Browsing this book is like reading the board diary of a ship, in which Cartier Bresson is a route officer but whose rudder is firmly controlled by Michele Di Giacomo, an author whom we wish long and adventurous journeys in those real-imaginary oceans to, in which he seems to navigate with natural dexterity.

Carlo Riggi

When he coined the expression “decisive moment”, Henri Cartier-Bresson should not have realized the trap he set to those who would have chosen him as their inspirer: There are countless pictures defined as “Bressonian” only because they stop climax of an action in time, however meaningless it might be.

It’s not like that in Michele Di Giacomo’s photography: he approached the great master with the necessary humbleness but also with the purpose to capture moments of life that do not leave indifferent, set in clean and precise compositions that exalt their essence.

This collection is the tangible testimony of this view.

We let his photos speak for themselves

Romano Sansone