Overcoming the banal beauty of the postcard landscape: stains are everyday realities, landscapes, scraps of life defined by chromatic contrasts
From 1986 to 1992, I sought a new way of representing reality aboard a helicopter, with the intention of overcoming the banal beauty of the postcard landscape. Stains are everyday realities, landscapes, scraps of life defined by chromatic contrasts. Mankind, whether in good or bad faith, has generated artifactual scenarios, he has written a screenplay in pursuit of the idea of profit that makes him the blind protagonist heading for the disaster he put into action. As I took flight, the curtain opened and I had a vision of an absorbed nature: the landscape had become severe and I discovered a boundless vastness of places subjected to the will of man.
Giacomo Giannini for Lampoon
Below me: a few alien men, fires, flames, lumps of fortuitous elements, magma, cars, strange mixtures of color and matter. I observed the stains left by man. What were these stains? Like everyone else, from a young age, I was clear about their meaning. Sometimes I coded item as traces, others as marks left by a substance on a surface, more often I interpreted them as a disgrace, a mistake, the result of not following a rule. This was confirmed in dictionaries and described by professors. The more I photographed, the more I understood and approached the texture of the medium and the pictures before my eyes, became more complex. We preach about the desire to become unblemished men and women, while we choose to become the actors of ourselves. Portraying spotless knights for the benefit of social order – only to turn into the ruthless opposite.
Giacomo Giannini
Born in Ancona in 1956, he graduated in Architecture and started collaborating with prominent architecture magazines.
Since the late Eighties he has been focusing on photography, using a helicopter to capture the Italian territory. Tourism, scenery and ecology are the main focuses of his works.
Photography Giacomo Giannini
Editorial Team
