In his illuminating “Before Photography”, Peter Galassi identifies two poles within which the realizations of perspective in Western representation have moved since its “discovery” in the 15th century. On one hand, perspective construction is considered a tool for building three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional surface; on the other, it is seen as a procedure that allows one to derive a two-dimensional image from a three-dimensional reality.
The labyrinthine structure of this sentence conceals a fundamental condition for photography—both for its centuries-long gestation and for the dizzying acceleration that led to its birth and diffusion—since the photographic medium natively implements the second interpretation and gives technical substance to what Svetlana Alpers, in *The Art of Describing*, calls the “Keplerian image.”
After the advent of technical images, painting—“liberated” (to use a famous expression by Jean Cocteau)—pushed this process to its extreme consequences, albeit at a slower pace than that suggested by standard art and photography history manuals. As a result, images became even flatter, or rather expanded their expressive possibilities by thinning out every trace of the third dimension, almost to the point of erasing it.
This path might seem one that painting was forced to follow alone, given the inextricably perspectival nature of photographic representation; yet even in photography one can find examples of extreme flattening. For instance, in a shot by Paolo Pellegrin, where reflection acts as a dissolver of perspectival regularity in an image that loses all sense of depth within the swirl of a visual vortex.
But form, however exemplary, can at most earn a photograph a place in the appendix of a book on analysis or semiotics; what makes it complicit in an extraordinary result is the way the formal element integrates with content and becomes a carrier of meaning. Here, the flattening of depth pushes the boy into the tree until his body merges with trunks and branches, while the skin of his face becomes bark like a postmodern Daphne pursued by an Apollo in uniform, barely visible behind him through the mesh of a police car. And just as the nymph’s metamorphosis is narrated by Ovid in a figurative style that generates expressiveness through the ekphrastic rendering of the phenomenon, so Pellegrin’s photograph restores a voice to the silent cry of the boy from Rochester. Meanwhile, the immobilized dynamism of his pose clashes with the almost mineral stillness of the bare tree—perhaps already dead—evoking the immobility of his impending detention or, who knows, that of a life that builds the walls and bars of its own small cell.In short, perhaps the sense of powerlessness of lives lived on the margins—and that mixture of sweat, anger, and fear that accompanies every arrest—cannot be fully conveyed in words; but, Pellegrin suggests, one can try to distill them into an image. And it is even possible to succeed.
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English translation based on ChatGPT translation services.