"Sono tutta negli occhi" The Retrospective of Sebastiana Papa at L'ARCA

L’ARCA in Largo San Matteo, hosts the anthological exhibition of Sebastiana Papa's photography "Sono tutto negli occhi" curated by Gabriele D'Autilia and Gianfranco Spitilli.

For forty years, the photographs of Sebastiana Papa (Teramo 1932-Rome 2002) have chronicled the entire world: from revolutionary Cuba to Africa at the height of decolonisation, from severe and mysterious Soviet Russia to the rebellious Paris of the 1968s. In each place, it is the people that attract her irresistibly: while the photographs that portray her almost do not exist, she focuses all her attention on others, on faces caught in the flash of the snapshot but that seem like studio portraits, obtained thanks to the long exposure times.

Through a reasoned selection of her work, the exhibition recounts the itineraries and subjects of a life dedicated to photography, but above all the stories and gazes, as David Grossman wrote while observing her images, of that great family to which we all belong, on whose face "time engraves its letters".

The exhibition will be inaugurated on 1 July at 6 pm at L'Arca - Laboratorio per le arti contemporanee and will be open until 19 November. It is the story of a gaze that of Sebastiana Papa, a discreet and gentle gaze, capable of annulling all other senses in order to stop on subjects, if only to observe their beauty and investigate their spirit, not necessarily to photograph them. An almost incomprehensible attitude today (an age of importunate and aggressive gazes) but still shared by photographers of his generation.

All young people want to choose their own destiny autonomously, and often find in the journey the ideal dimension also to get to know themselves; but for a young Italian woman of the 1960s it is not so obvious. The profession of photographer is also full of risks: travelling alone in the poorest or most unstable areas of the world requires courage, and then economic security is a mirage in a market without rules and full of competitors. However, she seems to possess, still young, the secrets of the trade: to make the presence of the photographic lens, always indiscreet, accepted requires patience and tact, innate qualities of her character.

And then she knows how to spontaneously create friendships, and is welcomed without mistrust among Congolese paratroopers as in the Buddhist temples of the Far East.

For forty years, Sebastiana Papa's photographs have chronicled the whole world: from revolutionary Cuba to Africa at the height of decolonisation, from severe and mysterious Soviet Russia to the rebellious Paris of the 1968s. In each place, however, it is the people that attract her irresistibly: while the photographs that portray her almost do not exist, she focuses all her attention on others, on faces caught in the flash of the snapshot but which seem like studio portraits, obtained thanks to the long exposure times.

But it is women that are her chosen subject, always told through her specific register, that of measure and silence: in the years in which the West was invested by the feminist revolution, Sebastiana Papa fascinatedly investigates the dimension of female spirituality, in its different declinations on every continent and in every religious belief. Hers is a writing in images (often accompanied by notebooks full of notes) that is always the result of profound reflection, particularly when she applies herself to her favourite subjects: India above all, the synthesis of all desire and where she returns as soon as she can, and Israel; children and the elderly, dance and ritual gesture.

Through a reasoned selection of his work, made up of many thousands of images, the exhibition recounts the itineraries and subjects of a life dedicated to photography, but above all the stories and glances, as the writer David Grossman wrote while observing his images, of that great family to which we all belong, on whose face "time etches its letters".