Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Matteo Terzaghi

dead matriarch who, gazing from this photograph inside a photograph, thus completes the family unit. Aside from one of the older children, everyone, including the woman in the wooden frame, is staring straight at us, but also at the void inside that black box, the camera itself. This image reunites what’s been separated: the husband finds his wife and the mother again finds herself surrounded by her children, even if it’s only in the distinguished realm of the photograph, where two layers of reality fuse into one. A friend of mine with an infallible eye recently found an image in a London boutique along Brick Lane, and it’s an image we could easily read as the continuation of Calvino’s story. Paraggi has married the woman who’d offered to pose for him, but what Calvino doesn’t say is that two years later, no longer able to put up with her husband’s photographic obsession, the woman runs off with their baby boy. In a desperate attempt to reunite the family, and now deliriously lonely, Paraggi decides to trust his camera one last time. He places a portrait of his wife and their baby near a mirror and tries to compose a shot that will capture all three of them in a single image. When he develops the roll, he has to admit that although the woman and child came out well, he’s been erased by the flash. And so Antonino Paraggi comes to

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