Photos, of course...
Of course, Luca Forno is a photographer of People and Things. And the apodictic and equally truthful peremptoriness of said assumption is testified to in the full by this photographs: Black on White, sic et simpliciter…
Furthermore, this 'black and white' is pyrotechnical in the opposite direction wherever, in its dual, polychromatic representation, it implodes the meaning of the image in an extraordinary blend of one within the other…
This is why these "infinite instants" - as Geoff Dyer might call them - that are Luca Forno's photographs are not - as Giuseppe Pinna might contend - "vehicles for truth, but rather the effects of truth, verisimilitudes," given that - to call upon the ineffable Karl Kraus - the same can be said of photography that he said of aphorisms. In other words, "they never coincide with the truth: they are either half-truths or a truth and a half."
Here, then, lies the root of the question that Forno - in these photographs - deliberately poses and - with these photographs - resolves in a manner of his own choosing. To be precise: the Consciousness that the Photographer manifests is twofold; the Solution that an Author attempts is multiple.
Therefore, the consciousness is twofold, and thus so is awareness of one's own means, and the entirety of the artwork - in the sapient use of chiaroscuro chromatic dichotomy - tells us in more than one way. Take a look for yourself and see… but of course so is that of one's own medium while, shot after shot, the photographer retraces with the subtle elegance of references and with what one might refer to as an à rebours approach, the history of black and white photography, passing - among others - from Mario Giacomelli to André Kertész and extending all the way to Walker Evans, like a practitioner mindful - and he is - of Dorothea Lange's lesson that "the photographic camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."
Therefore the interpretive approximation of these images always takes place by default, never by excess: the subjects captured in these photographs (people and things) say a great deal; Forno's photographs (People and Things) intuit even more… offering us a visual synecdoche within which the move from a single detail to the whole, or vice versa, is continuously evoked and stimulated by the Artist's talent.
marco riolfo, 2009
The unexpected unknown
If photography is a constant challenge to the laws of bi- dimensionality, these visual songs have something more.
The whole photography " takes its referent with itself" ( Roland Barthes) and whenit is high, brings the photographic significant.
The evil of banality brights of shining banalities and permeates the object of our attention in the celebration of mundane.
Here the strong sign of the images becomes the opening words of a true story which leads our conscience and eyes to a dilemma: to deal with an "elsewhere", so far, so close.
The synthesis and the sophisticated grammar of the color lack is here, in the same time, a set of rules and exceptions that Luca Forno well knows and that he declines without hesitation, with the experience that can take to choose the most important decision: "where and when you can shoot". The real photographic wisdom.
Each photograph is a bit of an universal language. A fluid story, stripped of all rhetoric, meditated by deep eyes, which goes directly to the emotional heart of the beholder.
The journey, impossible goal, reveals us the Author's look and a "humanity that, even though, resists", as McCurry says.
The beauty, here granted around a silent fulcrum, dialogues with our senses, using the language of the reality, in the technical perfection, and of the truth, in the stylistic vision.
lucy franco, 2011