“The name of the noema of photography will therefore be ‘it has been’.” The words of Roland Barthes sound even darker and more lapidary when recalled while looking at a photograph of someone – he called them the Spectrum – for whom the number of portraits has just reached a figure that can no longer be changed.
For most of us, Gianluca Vialli “has been” a professional footballer, active during the last two decades of the previous century. A few weeks ago, in the early days of January, the pages of newspapers and the screens of evening news programmes filled with his portraits. Most showed him young, running in the loose shirt that nobody wears anymore and that lent the stride of late-twentieth-century footballers an air of elastic, billowing elegance.;
It would be hard to find, among so many images, one more decontextualised than the one that cast a deep and serene gaze from the front page of a widely read national daily – a photograph taken by Fabio Lovino some years after Vialli’s retirement from competitive football. Today that is no obstacle; the outline of his head and the shape of his eyes are enough to identify the subject. But, in a little while, when a child born on the sixth of January of this year looks at this photograph for the first time, he will need to ask his father who this man was – this man who draws him in with those magnetic, composed eyes, and invites him to surrender with a benevolent trust to the vertigo that – as Armando González Torres has written – is generated by the abyss present in every human face.
It is in the almost tactile dimension that this photograph lends to that vertigo that its paradigmatic power unfolds. Because of it, a single archival goal will not be enough to satisfy the boy’s curiosity; gazing into those eyes that invite you to hold their stare, he too will feel a strange nostalgia for something that never was – for the sound of a voice that, from behind those hands, is about to speak a word we will always long to hear.
The photographs and images on this page, in compliance with copyright law, are reproduced for purposes of criticism and discussion pursuant to Articles 65, paragraph 2; 70, paragraph 1-bis; and 101, paragraph 1 of Law 633/1941.
English translation based on Claude.ai translation services.