“I learned how to make pictures by myself using a Nikon f1, travelling around the USA to experience for myself the relationship between universities and disabled students. I didn’t enter many competitions, but I worked for major magazines, both in Italy and abroad. I also worked on more than 300 advertising campaigns, mainly in Europe and Japan. At the moment, I contribute to Le Monde’s cultural pages, but for the last few years I’ve mostly been focused on my personal work.”
Marco Delogu was born in Rome in 1960. Since 2002 he has been the artistic director of FotoGrafia – the international festival of Rome. In 2003 he founded the Punctum publishing company. His work can be seen at www.marcodelogu.com
For me, pictures are a passion, something that happens naturally when you understand that sight is the most emotional sense. Slowly, step by step, you begin to develop a selective gaze, and start to question what is subjective and objective, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is extraordinary and what is normal in the world around you. It is a great way of getting to know and understand the world and ourselves, too – why do I see everything this way, while others see it so differently?
When making pictures is such an important part of your life, it is difficult to identify precisely how much of your life comes into your pictures and how much those pictures in turn begin to change and transform your life.
But photography requires you to be able to wait, to study, and to always question whether or not to develop a picture. This method of selecting images from the negative, of temporarily suspending everything else because your pictures are an integral part of your life, represents an attitude that will disappear as a result of digital media. It is an inherent problem in the technology – why stop when there is always the possibility of exponentially increasing the variations of what you see? This tendency has risks, such as no longer stopping to think about what you’re seeing. But you can accept these risks, as they are more than compensated by the chance to learn quickly, by increased control over what you’re doing, by the ability to intuitively change any number of parameters.
Every time I make a picture, I make choices – and every choice adds value to my personal method. In a world full of images, it is the delicate balance between the uniqueness of our life, and consequently of our vision, and the choices we make in creating a picture that will establish both a personal language and a recognisable approach.
I like to develop pictures using the optical bench, an instrument that seems to be from another era, and which is difficult to operate. I like to use it with my Pola 55, which allows me to produce a negative plate and a Polaroid print at the same time. My work is mainly concentrated on portraits, and often the Polaroid is a means by which to establish a deeper relationship with my subject. I also use medium-sized and digital cameras, both reflex and compact, just to make visual notes. I believe that the fundamental difference in working with a digital camera is that it never lets you forget that making a picture is always an experience.
The message I want to convey through my portraits is really simple – I want to meet and remember people that have been part of my life, or of my dreams or nightmares. I want to put them on paper, captured and re-created in a two-dimensional image, between the four sides of which I try to find a depth, a third dimension.
Being a photographer is a fascinating profession, one which is completely absorbing and difficult at the same time. You must study and ask questions about the world, look at the work of other photographers, understand the times you are living in, study the classics, and be aware of what happens in other arts, e.g. cinema, literature and contemporary art. And then you must understand how to balance the commercial and artistic aspects of the profession.
My ten commandments for digital photography:
These commandments go beyond just digital photography, and I believe they represent something really important: while the digital camera has clearly brought about a photographic revolution – it has made a far greater impact on our lives than the first compacts, and it has offered increased opportunities to get involved in the development process – there is still a technical aspect that does not affect what represents a way to be live.