Talking about photography and architecture

Your work depicts a strong feeling of reality, mainly in your Haitian serie where you almost document an earthquake. Do you intend to relay the architecture or what can happen to it to a specific community?

Filippo Romano: This picture belongs to an assignment I did for a magazine in January 2010, just ten days after this earthquake. The focus was to photograph the city, a city that had collapsed from this earthquake. But it was not really to document the emergency of the people but more to document what the city looked like after such a strong natural disaster. What’s going on right after the community organizes itself ans what’s going to happen afterward?This specific picture is somehow tragic and ironic because it really looks like a “toy architecture”. And the reason why this building collapsed in this way really is because of the cheap concrete it was built in. And this picture really talks about that. This tragic image is related to a certain daily life, and hoe superficial may be living and constructing and thus building cities. It reflects the story of many countries, where the corruption level is high, and many buildings are built illegally…It a real look at our earth, at our urban landscape that seems to be designed as a children game where if it comes to collapse, well it might look this way.

You have collaborated with the publisher Skira, how did you develop your view of architecture during this collaboration?

The relationship with Skira was simply a professional one, where I had an assignment, and a book was published. They chose the way they wanted to publish it so they might change the color of the sky making it more blueish to agree with the market for example. Some books, like the monography are important to me because we chose a very important Italian architect. Or the last I did, on the so-called “Pinetta”where all the best Italian architects work during the late 50’s and the beginning of the 60’s. Yes, that is a book I remember but the others, honestly, were just jobs.

Does this mean that you think of that kind of assignment uniquely in a professional approach? I mean, at some point does it pushes you into your development personal and/or technical?

If it’s talking about architecture photography, in general, I try to combine as much as possible and to look for the architecture soul. And I’m not an architect, by the way. I try to put together my personal, let’s say, more emotional part of the work whenever it’s possible. From a professional point of view, I can do it when the client understands it. The client come to you for specific reason, he is not looking for something generic, he likes the way you look at things. He might not call you because you did a standard work on architecture but because you show capabilities of looking at things from a certain perspective, because you can cease the moment. That’s when you are not just a professional photographer but become a photographer. Your work depicts a strong contrast of architecture and portray. Is this an illustration of your different personalities? There’s also 20 years of my life there, for me the coherency is inside the project. You should not find your own style and repeat it forever. I am a curious person, and my curiosity goes through certain steps.
I have been working a long-term project in Nairobi starting from a ghetto where building a school took like three years. And I started documenting the construction, but it was important to show the community around.  
So, it was a little shift there, where I tried to ling everything through the idea of an economical system in a third world country with the economy of a first world country because Kenya follows the same regulation as United-States. But it’s like the US in Africa…

I read an article on Nairobi’s economy which was very positive but very abstract. But when economists can only read numbers, there’s a problem. So, I went to the other side and decided to give a voice and a face to this economy that is going out door to door to try and sell things. I started with a street vendor, because they fascinate me, and I wanted to know their story. In Nairobi I’m always with a local guide, who turns out to be my assistant, and who tells me all about the complexity of the situation. Let’s say that architecture and traditional urban landscape give a sense of objectivity. And I try to fell a sense of duty because objectivity doesn’t completely exist. So yes, these are different part of my identity. Because I don’t focus on architecture for architecture but on architecture as the space where people live in. When I take a picture of a building, I imagine what this picture will become in a while, as a part of a collective memory. I enter in a longtime narration of places.

Do you plan your pictures, or do you shoot spontaneously, instinctively?

I Normally study before. If it’s possible, I look at things already done. But there’s a moment I mix everything. It’s like going to a library, reading some books, and then mixing them all together. Because that the way I remember things. You should not photograph too literally there must be the experience of the places. The project and the vision of architecture should be in something more complex. Otherwise, we are just executor of an esthetic. I didn’t decide to become a photographer to execute beauty.

You started photography form a very young age. How did it influence you today?

I think I was much older when I was younger. And I’m joking about saying that. But what I mean is that when you’re young, you are fresh. Of course, your brain works wonderfully, but the weirdness is what challenges you. And sometimes you need to follow certain schemes because you don’t know that those schemes are already done. Then you slowly find your own language and your own position in the world, and you find your own vision. Honestly it took me a while to achieve the vision I have today. It happened in my thirties. Before that I did some interesting things, but most of wasn’t.
It changed when I went to New York to study at ICP. I already was an architecture photographer. But New York is really the place that changed me a lot. BEfore that, I was in Paris, the biggest library of the world and I had full access to culture. But in find New York to be much more my city because of its dynamics.  

How do you relate to reality in your work ?

I mix a lot the language so I might us architecture photography even when I have to say something about the housing problematics of Milan. I think the language itself helps to not fall into let’s say a pathetic vision. You need to keep a necessary distance to respect the project and to avoid creating a fake intimacy that happens quite often in reportage. There’s one thing I did in in Nairobi, not in all the series, but as much as possible, is to have the subject looking at me. Because there was clearly a complex relationship between this white guy going around and asking strange question about economy, how much you get pay per day and so on and those people that make their own living day by day. Not that I don’t struggle in my life, but of course I come from a different situation and this idea of having them looking at the camera ss that very well-known scheme. I’m honestly curious about the life in the ghetto. I learn a lot. And I don’t pretend to save anybody. If I can help to the cultural understanding a little bit, my work in that case is done. And for me, it’s not about poor people. Yes, of course they are poor people but for me, it’s about traces of memory that I collect for them.
For the rest, architecture, I use the architecture photography language in a non-architecture environment. On the other side, there are two different lines. When I must do jobs to survive, so the client asks for something, and I do it and this is the less interesting. And the third line is when the client understands who I am and really wants to want me to find something that gives a special vision to his own architecture.  

There were probably only architects who came to me saying : “we don’t want blue sky, we want the real light of Milan, we want to see all the surrounding, we don’t care about our architecture, we don’t want design features, we want to see our architecture, how is it sleeping, how is it responding to the surrounding environment…” For me this is like heaven at that point. I did the Feltrinelli foundations, and it’s interesting they didn’t want to talk to me until the building was nearly finished and then they say now, we want your story, your own vision. And I was really happy. Because you can do great features with the gray sky and photography can change a great day into something else, and that’s why it’s not about reality.

And what about light? It’s a central focus for a photographer and as architects it’s essential to us. Sometimes it’s our starting point. Do you prefer a specific kind of light?

Yeah, I like cast days. The cast is the best I can see more. But I also think that the photographer should be able to use the wrong light. What I call the wrong light is maybe photographing at noon in the middle of the desert? I mean, I’m just giving you an example. It’s interesting to see how places look like anyway, and the real duty of a photographer is to be a witness of life. My personal life is definitely cast.

Could you talk about one of your favorite project ?

STATALE 106. It’s a road I have been working on for a long time, since 2007, it’s like a road movie. It’s not a movie, but it’s the same. The idea of making these 500 kilometers and photographing sometimes the same place two years apart or finding people on this road. It represents the history of the South of Italy for me. I was born in the South, in Sicily, and I grew up in Milan.  

And my grandmother was from the West of Calabria. And when I was a child, we were going to Sicily and to Calabria to visit our relatives. So, this road remains in my memory as a child and then when I was an adult and I was already a photographer, I went to visit a cousin of mine who is working for the Interior Ministry, and he works on the topic of the mafia. And I went to visit him because he was substituting the mayor when the mayor was polluted with mafia. So, the government, when they found out that the mayor was corrupted, decided to “cut the head” of the elected mayor and to send somebody from the administration in order to restore the situation. And this small village that became very famous in the 80’s for kidnapping is alongside this road. This project is not about mafia, but in a way, everything has a connection with something that has to do with machine, but it’s more about the history of the Sao and how the central government has abandoned the South, always trying to push him down. The southern Italians, saying they are lazy, they don’t want to work and so on. But simply after the unification of Italy, the South was, let’s say, the colony of the north and many went to Switzerland. Like the village of my grandfather doubled its population during the summer because all the population was working in Basel or Zurich. I’m talking about working class people who didn’t have an education, but they were workers. So, I mean, I’m just giving you this. It is not even about that, it’s just that I found certain crazy buildings along this road that just show that everything is connected to this history. But first, for me this is about taking a car and traveling and stopping whenever I find something interesting that I want to photograph. And I am like that in general.