Sopravvissuti. Ritratti, Storia, Memoria

Firenze: Fratelli Alinari, 2004. Firenze, 2004; br., pp. 96, 73 ill. col., cm 25x22. (La Fotografia Racconta). The photographic search from which this book is born is begun in March 1998 and is finished just some week before its publication: years of searches, waiting, refusals and smiles. I approached to the complex universe of the deportation nearly for case, through the diary of a survivor. Then other readings, other testimonies, other history have come. Intimate and choral memories. But also eternal and ephemeral if destined to remain just in the mind of who read written pages. To photograph has meant to try to give to their words eyes, lips, faces. Because behind these faces there are personal tragedies but also great course. Behind these faces many traces can be noticed: the collective history of the Italian deportation, the personal vicissitude of who has been deported and the direct knowledge of the portrayed persons. Primo Levi wrote: "I am a common man with a good memory that is fell in a whirl": this could be the definition of these persons and their experience of small-big witnesses who tell extraordinary things. In these images there is not completeness but just the attempt to help to tell the lives of men and women who are exceptional because they are normal, like the hope to continue what begun with their testimonies.