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the WAR - A Sicilian Story

by Tony Gentile

Photographs: Tony Gentile

Text: Davido Enia

Publisher: postcart

180 pages

Year: 2016

ISBN: 978-8898391264

Price: 33 €

Comments: English

Coverage of Palermo: street life, politics, murders, and an undeclared war that in the nineties hit an entire city. This book reconstructs a piece of Italian history through memories that will allow a younger generation to know the facts that may no longer be remembered, knowledge that is essential for growth. In a contact print from negatives of pictures taken on March 27, 1992, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino are sitting at the same table. Of the four pictures from that afternoon more than twenty years ago, one has become an icon of an Italy that no longer exists. Capturing a moment in time, as Leonardo Sciascia once put it, can be "a unique photograph, a moment of unrepeatable equilibrium between form and content." Life and death alternately sweetly. Among his negatives there is neither indulgence nor any attempt to evoke pity.

They are not part of the baggage he carries while he shoots pictures. Instead, it is news, documenting an event and passing it on for what it is. He shoots. Others can decode, others can attribute meta-linguistic meanings to what is simply a picture.

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