Scriptphotography by Giuseppe Cicozzetti

Language, above all. Those who are attentive to language, where by language it’s necessary to understand the terminal and explosive expression of thought, will appreciate the photographer's tension in establishing a new relationship between himself and the photographed object, when he decrees a new relationship with observation.
The image, which is entrusted with the narrative task, presents itself crossed by new expressive codes whose goal is to establish a new balance that knows how to interpret the rebellious challenge of a contemporary that intends to overcome the reassuring static nature of a tradition.
Sicily is a land whose narration is inexhaustible, a "place of memory", as Vincenzo Consolo loved to call it, which in its memory assumes and frees meanings and allusions often as contrasting as profound, almost like Sicilian photographers - the line is long and illustrious - had decided to engage with the island a personal relationship, a space of foundation in which to agree a private, personal mediation, a confrontation to two.
"Sicily" by Massimo Gurciullo is part of the debate between new and old language, between a style that seems to have exhausted its exploration and therefore is looking for new protagonists to whom to entrust a new voice.
As a writer he’s also a strong reader, a good photographer must love the work of his great colleagues and, it must be said, Gurciullo declines well every lesson absorbed. In his photographs Sicily, be it represented by her children - the impromptu portraiture is painful and poetic - or the glimpses that seem to break out of an enveloping darkness, refers to the great lesson of Moriyama, to his "constructions" fast and nervous , as something to capture before it vanishes to deliver it in full to the contemporaneity of a visual grammar or, alternately, to the D'Agata "quick visions".
"Sicily" is crossed by a strong rhapsodic tension. From the plot of the narration we enter and exit, we fall deeper and then return to breathe. And in this whirlwind, in which the black and white of Gurciullo is so wisely measured up to compete with the protagonist role with the same subjects, Sicily assumes estranging contours, almost elusive and determined to let itself be chased before revealing itself.
In this "Sicily" it resembles a jazz composition. It has the rhythm. It has the same happy and conceptual iconoclastic fury, where this commitment is aimed at "interpreting", and therefore making new, something that we already know and realize in its deconstruction.
And what we already know is crystallized, overcome by new narrative imperatives, but whose "melody" remains recognizable at least until it resumes improvisation. And indeed the observation of "Sicily" leads us to some reflections on how in the meantime the human geography, not only territorial, has changed of a Sicily that desires an aedo, a mentor to entrust his new voice. "Sicily" is a passionate photobook, a well-constructed series of photographs with a documental flavor in which the details, the "rapid gait of normality" are revelers of a time that changes and transmigrates into our imagination.
To settle down. Like a new language that claims to be understood. Massimo Gurciullo is an active witness of an era that has abandoned the mists of the dawn to become clear reality, luminous and obscure, contradictory and linear. "Sicily" is his statement, his declaration of intent, something to deal with.

Giuseppe Cicozzetti ( Scriptphotography )