Mattia Vacca: reporting from the margins

Mattia Vacca's photographs boast complete aesthetic self-sufficiency, for, though beautiful when viewed individually, they are intended to be read and understood as part of a series. They communicate the tension that inheres in reportage, and convey a specific sense of place and situation, evidenced in, for example, the images of the Lithuanian military units in the Kaliningrad enclave waiting for the Russians as if they were Buzzati’s barbarians; images of varying intensity of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict; an image of one of the last ritual carnivals of the Alps, in Schignano; and images of horsemen in the mountains of Barbagia. What they all have in common is their liminality, for these are pictures forever on the verge of disappearing from the margins of history, geography and the chronicles of everyday life.

If we had to identify recurring formal characters from among the images of disparate situations and places, we would find them in the subjects of the photographs, whose secretive expressions and surreptitious glances bristle with intrigue, interrogation and threat. Like a dagger point, the images pierce the consciousness of the beholder and throw the underlying poetics of Mattia Vacca’s vision into sharp relief.