Small wheels, an elegy

The cornerstone of this work is wheels, and it seems almost a tautology; ever since they were invented in the very distant past, still lurking on the edge of prehistory, they in all their forms and uses have been central to our past and present civilisations.

From the war chariot wheels of the pharaohs to the potter’s wheel, from the full wheels of a farmer’s cart loaded with hay on the cobblestones of a medieval city to the mysterious wheels of the Antikythera mechanism, each wheel has been simultaneously part of reality, instrument and symbol: the wheel of fortune, rather than the cogwheel, the basis of time measurement and emblem of its inexorable passing. G.G.Belli wrote in one of his sonnets ‘La Morte sta anniscosta innell’orloggi (…)’ (Death is hidden in clocks).

But these are important, proud wheels, on which runs, it must be said, History with a capital letter, they are the mighty wheels of Francesco Guccini’s Locomotive. On the other hand, a supermarket shopping trolley also travels on wheels, albeit small and humble, or a bicycle (on which, moreover, much has been painted, photographed and written), or a wheelbarrow, but they are prosaic wheels, without any Pindaric flights, which at most can express the subtle melancholy of abandonment when they are out of their context, or a certain sense of the absurd when they express the paradox of objects made for movement immobilised by some strange game of fate.

Small insignificant things, close relatives of non-places, which have always exerted a certain fascination on me and my way of photographing precisely because of their insignificance, which makes us ask why photograph them, and which can express better than more characterised objects the synthesis between what the photographer sees and what is in his mind.