Improvisation #1, by Antonio Bassi.

Normally, I resist the idea of including both photography and paintings, drawings, etc. in the same art competition. After all, it’s much easier to make a nice-looking photograph than it is to make a nice-looking work of art. A photographer and an artist both have to make judgments concerning content, composition, light, mood, and all the other elements inherent in visual arts. However, an artist has to learn to control the process of making marks on paper/canvass, etc, which can take years of practice just to be competent, while the work of creating the actual image is done by the camera, not by the photographer. Before all the photographers reading this grab their torches and pitchforks, notice in the previous paragraph I said a “nice-looking” photograph. Photography becomes art when it moves beyond a merely attractive image and into a realm where real creativity and real artistic inspiration are required. Antonio Bassi does this with “Improvisation #1.” To create this piece, Bassi apparently positioned himself somewhere above a pedestrian walkway, probably in an atrium since you can see the reflection of lights on the floor. In each panel, a few people appear, most walking rapidly in one direction or another, but now frozen in small clusters. The overall effect looks like musical notes on a scale, something Bassi acknowledges in his title. We associate improvisation with, especially jazz, and there’s something very jazzy about this whole piece. The positioning of the figures is random in each panel, yet as a group they feel like they have some meaning. I even asked my wife, who’s a musician, if she could decode the figures as musical notes and whether they actually played anything. (They don’t, but you could have fooled me.) The background color, which is created by the floor, is slightly different in each panel; not enough to be distracting, but enough to be interesting. On close inspection, most of the figures are dressed in dark clothing, but there’s a sprinkling of color throughout. There’s certainly quite a bit of thought in the creation of this piece… one can imagine Bassi going through the hundreds of photos he probably took, eliminating many of them for a variety of reasons, selecting certain ones, arranging and re-arranging them until he was completely satisfied with the result. And the result is, in fact, very satisfying, and really a work of art. Taken as a whole, this piece is repetitive but with subtle variations, nicely nuanced inside a unifying structure. It’s a complicated jazzy piece, which takes a familiar sight and does something very unfamiliar with it. There’s a real richness to it, and real creativity. Very nicely done.  

  - Bill Harrison

Gli alberi di Parco Michelotti, Torino. Antonio Bassi.

Margaret Bourke-White
Dr. Kurt Lisso, Leipzig’s city treasurer, and his wife and daughter after taking poison to avoid surrender to U.S. troops, Leipzig, 1945

Margaret Bourke-White
German civilians made to face their nation’s crimes, Buchenwald
1945

Margaret Bourke-White                                                                                           There’s no way like the American way!

© Samuele Pellecchia 2012