THE WIZARD’S HOUSE

Essay by Mario Santoro - Woith

The Wizards’ house is a place in the mind. For the futurist artist Fortunato Depero (1920) it was the workshop of the creation, the place where the intuitions concentrate themselves to give life to the magic of art.

In photography it could be said that the house of the magician is the dark room. But we are not talking about a physical place. In the Wizards’ house different systems meet: the sensitivity of the artist, the right moment, and the predisposition of this moment to to be picked.

In the scuptures of Michelangelo, he is saying "per furor di levare", He means that his subjects were already in the marble, imprisoned, and that he freed the form with his tools. The same thing is there in photography, that the moment and the situation already exists, and the photographer sees it and catches it in that moment. Magic!

Photography, catching a moment, an indivisible instant, succeeds to contain simultaneously the passed, the present and the future. This is the creative place, the alchemy of the meeting of all these elements.

Photography is feeling that is sublimated into material.

Why photography is magic?

Because it succeeds to represent motion.

Because it gives life to a long conceptual and relativistic series of phylosophical thoughts, such as : "what you see with your eyes is not always the reality", in a line of thought that exists in Magritte.

What we are talking about is what Foucault named “calligrammi”, A pipe on which is written "this is not a pipe": Although this was not photography, it can be considered as one of the concepts of the photographic matrix Joseph Kosuth has been working in this same direction. His series of a chair, with a photograph of a chair, with the definition of chair taken from the dictionary: which one is the reality?

Because photography frees other art forms from the necessity of reproducing reality.

Because it can emulate our memory. Milan Kundera wrote that our memory does not film, but photographs.