I sometimes suspect that the anthropological purpose of photography is to reassure both those who make it and those who view it that reality is endowed with some perceptible form of structure. It is no coincidence that, if one backdates its birth to the seventeenth-century spread of the camera obscura, it is impossible not to notice that the need for an instrument capable of observing the world in search of its representability coincides precisely with the era in which Western man becomes disconcertingly aware that variety is not a blanket laid over reality by things themselves. There is no geometry underlying the imperfections of matter; everywhere, from the immensely distant to the infinitely near, there is a variability that seems to elude our capacity to organise the world — and therefore to prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by its unpredictability.
It is not merely a desire for knowledge; the need for control stems from the kind of relationship the human being is compelled to establish with the environment that immediately surrounds him. Too weak a creature to weave a purely reactive relationship with the world, man must play ahead, must understand in order to protect himself and survive. The expulsion from the Garden of Eden carries precisely this symbolic weight: the inapplicability, for man, of the pact with nature that all other animals had struck and to which they remain faithful.
In short, for the human being, the environment — and therefore “nature” as well — is above all a problem to be solved. Postmodernity is the time in which confidence in the solutions found begins to crack; and a nostalgia emerges for an Edenic past in which harmony between man and environment was, if not possible, at least negotiable on less aggressive terms.
Through the haze of the Rovigo plain mingling with the dust raised by the hoes, Berengo Gardin’s photograph aligns peasant women and trees, finding space for the former among the latter — an image that suggests equilibrium, unfolding in horizontal bands in which the human figure and the mulberry plants articulate the two central strips, interlocking without overlapping: a symbol of a coexistence between man and land grounded in harmonious respect. In the background, the silhouettes of two elms seem to assign to the vegetable — and therefore “natural” — element a delicate, benevolent, and evanescent supremacy.
The image returns us to a time when the control man exercised over the environment was marked by an effort renewed each day, one that found in that very labour its own reason and justification. In a world that was about to wake from the dream of the economic boom, Gardin’s photograph takes shape as a nostalgia for a present that is inexorably slipping toward an unrecoverable past.
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.