Guy Tillim

Guy Tillim seeks a non-monumental Rome, a continuation of his previous project, Avenue Patrice Lumumba, which arrives here with him. Africa is a gargantuan concept, as Ryszard Kapuscinski mentioned in a conversation when he participated in the first edition of FotoGrafia, and Africa is in Tillim’s mind and eyes as he embarks on this project away from Africa. Tillim seeks the middle city, the middle light (the rainiest winter in years is a privilege for him); he seeks an idea born out of his extended watching of neo-realist cinema, which he re-elaborates in the field. In this middle city, the most complex thing is scale: how near, how far? Much lies in this strong tension of the quest for scale in the middle city, a city where Tillim is alone, free to think, to approach and to move away.

Like Josef Koudelka’s Rome (the “Theatre of Time”, which inaugurated the Rome commissions in 2003), Tillim’s city is without people, and also without overt sentimentalism. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the only photo in which a person plays a role – admittedly portrayed from behind – is also the only one in which there is sun. For Tillim, neo-realism acted as a hook, a handhold, from which to start and to hold onto during the most difficult times of seeing the city afresh, in the same way that postcolonial architecture was the point of departure for Avenue Patrice Lumumba. But he goes far beyond neo-realism and its structures and formats. I like to think that Tillim’s first book on a subject outside Africa will also be the first of others that abandon the strictures of what went before, and head towards a difficult, beautiful and profound walk with freedom of seeing. (Marco Delogu)