Vintage gelatin silver print on polycoated paper
cm 11,7 x 18 | 4.6 x 7.1 in
Photograher's notes in black ink on the verso


A great experimenter, Paolo Gioli has always moved in a heterodox expressive dimension, where research on the language of photography has always been privileged, realised by resorting to the most ductile materials such as Polaroids, which, from simple sensitive materials with immediate development, in hands like his have been transformed into artistic works worthy of wonder. The use of ancient tools that he loves so much, such as the pinhole - a tiny hole, the pinhole, as a lens - is in him aimed at a reinterpretation of the past in a contemporary key where the boundaries between genres are cancelled. This can be seen in front of the frames of two experimental films by Vampa Production that are well known among insiders and less so by the general public: 'The Pierced Operator' and 'The Man Without a Camera'. The former reuses a clip from an anonymous Pathé film manipulated by inserting other images in the perforation that obstruct the vision of an operator in action, the latter (which cites, inverting it, the title of Dziga Vertov's film) is made with a self-produced camera, a hollow metal rod, equipped with a manual drag that shoots objects, glimpses of landscapes, fragments of bodies.