02/03/2024
Vincenzo Suma (b. Ceglie Messapica 1981)
"Art is the skill of finding," said Picasso, "finding traces of the human quality." Art for this has to do with archaeology, with the patient search for traces of our passage through the world, with the archiving of proof that we are immutably the same humans we have always been.
'It is not uncommon to meet Vincenzo Suma on the streets of the village with his Lumix LX 100 and Nikon d 750 hanging around his neck in search of images, places and faces to photograph and to capture the unrepeatable moment to be immortalized that will never return. Vincenzo is a street photographer and his streets, his landscapes are those of ancient Kailia that seems lost in unchanging and eternal time. In this sense he is a dialectal poet of the image and his poetic horizon is enclosed in the microcosm of a village in the Bassa Murgia, an enclave that time has not nicked and that perennially lives in the magic of its rituals and mythopoiesis. Photography means "writing with light," and it is in this sense that the photos Suma offers us with his black and whites should be read. To do this requires long times to escape the aesthetics of haste, to capture the depth of things, and only in this way can photography be transformed into art. In the photos of Vincenzo Suma we can find what Henry Cartier Bresson used to say: "It is an illusion photos are taken with the machine, they are taken with the heart, with the whole head" Vincenzo believes in people and memories and this is the most genuine poetic mark of his photography and his shots.' Vincenzo Gasparro 2021
'Diaries from the South is a journey several years long, made with tenderness and curiosity, a mosaic of faces and bodies, of shadows and gestures but also of scents and voices, all imprinted in the frame of a photo. Vincenzo loves to photograph simple people, the fragile and poetic elderly, twisted like olive tree trunks or ironic like medieval gargoyles while, leaning against a pole, they observe the hurry of others, or while sitting on the pale stone they shell almonds in the August sun, or again while filling bottles with water from a fountain. They are often backlit outlines that silhouetted sharply against the white lime of the downtown alleys, icons of local history, imprinted in the sensory memory of those who were born here or even lived here for a few years.
They are the last dark handkerchiefs, the felt caps and vests, the starched aprons and hands that have worked endless seasons of soil or kneaded half a century of flour. After them, this 'poetic alphabet will be lost forever, and Vincenzo, an archaeologist by training and poetics, rescues them from oblivion as seed keepers do and guards them with modesty and affection. Through his tales of history and stories, through the glimpses/windows of his photos, beneath the surface of the apparent, he unveils for a very brief instant the mystery of existence and places, rituals and stone, instants fixed in the memory of the heart and thus destined to accompany us forever.' Silvia Pettinicchio
