Let's Acquire Accentuated Dynamism

Berlin, 2018

It is utterly unfair and in total contradiction of important core British values to mock foreigners for not speaking perfect English (What?? Whoever told you that? Ed.) but sometimes you can't help having a little dig, especially at the expense of anyone whose innate sense of irony is, shall we say, underdeveloped, and whose pomposometer needle has somehow got stuck at zero. It is especially unfair to laugh at words translated directly into unidiomatic English by, I assume, Google Translate's less fluent younger brother, Mangle. Doubly so when the original was written in one of those flamboyantly mystifying dialects, French or Italian art-speak. However...

I do recall having a little fun with the translated texts within what is one of my most revered photobooks, Kodachrome by Luigi Ghirri (see Postcards 4 and its antidote, Not So Fast, English...). Sadly, like so many of the best photographic books, it is not well served by the words that someone has seen fit to burden it with. It's as if, from a publisher's point-of-view, a book of mere pictures is not a proper book unless some explanatory verbosity has been tacked on fore and aft. As Alice didn't say, what is the use of a book without bloviation or obfuscation?

So I think this choice bit of puff I read in the Photo London Magazine is fair game, assuming that "fish in a barrel" are fair game [Not, according to Hoyle – but go for it. Ed.]:

“Florence Di Benedetto has total control of both the photographic and pictorial aspects and this allows her to obtain a dialectical synthesis of the two expressiveness in her works. Although photography is the starting point, it is the pictorial gesture that then intervenes decisively. The color illuminates only some limited areas and in this way the white and black acquire a greater fluidity, exalting themselves in a relationship between fullness and emptiness that makes the image acquire a sense of depth that is both visual and symbolic because it does not stop the image but puts it in a context where it acquires an accentuated dynamism.” 

– Roberto Mutti, historian and critic of photography

Say what, Roberto? I mean, I can sort of see what you're driving at – although how and why you make a distinction here between "photographic" and "pictorial" aspects is more than a little questionable – but is there a single sentence – a single clause, even – in that verbal effusion that actually enhances our appreciation or understanding of these (to my mind, rather sterile and static) pictures? Maybe it makes perfect sense in Italian? But let me see if I can render that into workaday English:

Florence Di Benedetto likes to stage photographs with no colour or detail in most of the area surrounding the isolated subject matter, which means there's little else to look at, giving a rather over-emphatic importance to whatever it is, like a brightly illuminated vitrine with a single dead mouse inside.

How's that? Close enough for jazz, I think. Now, young Google Mangle, translate it for us, please:

A Florence Di Benedetto piace mettere in scena fotografie senza colori o dettagli nella maggior parte dell'area circostante il soggetto isolato, il che significa che c'è poco altro da guardare, dando un'importanza un po' eccessiva a qualunque cosa sia, come una vetrina brillantemente illuminata con un solo topo morto all'interno.

Cool! So, now we've reverse-engineered some ornate Italian art-speak into blunt-instrument Anglo-Saxon and back again into Manglo-Italian, have we acquired some accentuated dynamism, too, or simply failed to exalt ourselves in a relationship between fullness and emptiness? Well, it's always been a tricky one, that, hasn't it? In the end, though, I'd have to say that the ironic gesture has intervened decisively.

Berlin, 2018