Grazie a voi.

"Die italienische Migration dokumentiert sich selbst", lese ich auf der Website des Limmat Verlags. Was für eine tolle Idee! durchfährt es mich, Fotos von italienischen Gastarbeitern (wie sie damals genannt wurden) zu zeigen, die diese von sich selber und ihren Familien gemacht hatten. Kein Blick von aussen, sondern die Innenansicht, die ich mir natürlicher, unverkrampfter, direkter vorstelle. Doch ist sie es? Verstellen sich die Menschen nicht ganz automatisch, wenn sie wissen, dass sie fotografiert werden?

Grazie a voi. versammelt Fotografien von Familien und Einzelpersonen zusammen mit Aufnahmen von Fotografen, die an offiziellen Anlässen und Festen der italienischen Gemeinschaft aufgenommen worden sind. Gerade heute, wo man, trotz besseren Wissens, gelegentlich den Eindruck hat, Migration sei entweder etwas gänzlich Neues oder liege schon so weit zurück, dass sie höchstens für spezialisierte Historiker ein Thema sein könne, ist das ein besonders aktueller Band.

Zur Erinnerung: Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg gab es in Italien nicht für alle Arbeit. Nicht wenige versuchten, auch der höheren Löhne wegen, ihr Glück in der Schweiz. Auch warben Schweizer Firmen in Italien aktiv um Arbeitskräfte. Schon damals galt, was auch heute gilt: Die Menschen folgen dem Kapital.

Die Herausgeber haben die Bilder thematisch gegliedert: Arbeit, Familie, Bildung, Vereine usw. Ganz besonders angesprochen hat mich die Kategorie "Eleganz", wo auch dieser schöne Satz zu finden ist: "Dem Stigma des Fremden setzen sie Eleganz und Lässigkeit entgegen." Das Titelbild illustriert das bestens; die Legende dazu lautet: "Giuseppe bittet seine Cousine Pierina, ihm wieder einmal gutes italienisches Essen zuzubereiten, damit er den Gürtel nicht noch enger schnallen müsse." Se non è vero, è  ben trovato.

Die Aufnahmen in diesem Band entstammen dem Zeitraum zwischen dem Zweiten Weltkrieg bis in die 1980er Jahre und sind nicht nur ein eindrückliches Zeitdokument, sondern zeigen unter anderem auch auf, wie der junge politisch engagierte Gymnasiast Raniero Fratini, der seit dreissig Jahren als Kulturredaktor für das Schweizer Radio in Lugano (RSI), damals die Migranten in der deutschen Schweiz porträtierte.

Am Ende des Bandes finden sich auch "Gedanken der zweiten Generation", unter denen man auch so erhellende Sätze wie diese von Larissa Alghisi Rubner findet: "Unsere Eltern haben uns etwas mitgegeben, das Eliteschulen oder Kulturreisen nicht lehren. Nämlich dass man die Wahl hat, unbefriedigende Umstände hinter sich zu lassen, um – etwa in einem anderen Land – etwas Besseres zu suchen und das Beste daraus zu machen."

GRAZIE A VOI.

Ricordi e Stima – Fotografien zur italienischen Migration in der Schweiz

A cura di / Herausgegeben von

Marina Widmer

Guliano Alghisis

Fausto Tisato

Rolando Ferrarese

Limmat Verlag, Zürich 2016

Kuwait: A Desert on Fire, by Sebastião Salgado

Hundreds of oil wells (between 605 and 732 were reported) had been sabotaged and set alight by the Iraqi army near the end of its occupation of Kuwait between early August 1990 and late February 1991. "It felt as if the end were nigh. With the sun obliterated by dark smoke, a Dantean landscape stretched as far as the eye could see. The horizon itself was marked by torches of fire where burning oil leapt from the lifeless desert. And all around, thick pillars of crude oil spewed into the sky before falling back to earth to form treacly black lakes that, without warning, could become gigantic infernos", writes Sebastião Salgado in his introduction. He also mentions what can't be seen or imagined when we allow these forceful photographs to sink in, "the noise, a deafening roar that only grew louder as I came closer to the source of this cataclysm", the sabotaged and now burning oil wells.

Photograph: Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas/Taschen

One day, near the Greater Burgan oil field in the Ahmadi district, Salgado came across what had once been a royal menagerie where he found one large bird covered in oil and where he also saw this once powerful stallion reduced to a sad skeletal figure in search of grass to eat.

Photograph: Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas/Taschen

The workers's task was not only hard and difficult but also very risky – "the metal tools they were using on iron wellheads could produce a spark that would relight the fires." Moreover, there were the toxic fumes. the slippery ground, the smoke and the oil lakes built to receive spilled oil that could easily ignite; one also had to be wary of land mines and unexploded cluster bombs.

Photograph: Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas/Taschen

Photographs are essentially documents that show us how things once looked. So why is this book published twenty-five years after the drama it portrays? When Salgado studied his archives, he realised that many of these photos had never been published. "But, more important, I felt the images had a timeless quality; they were taken in 1991, but they could be taken today or tomorrow if a similar disaster occurred."

Salgado dedicated this book "to the few hundred fearless men from a handful of nations who brought courage and talent and risked their lives and limbs to halt one of the worst environmental catastrophes in recent memory. for me, they were the true heroes of the First Gulf War."

Sebastião Salgado

KUWAIT

A Desert on Fire / Eine Wüste in Flammen / Un Désert en Feu

Taschen, Cologne 2016

Copacabana Palace

Copacabana Palace, I learn from the introduction, is the best known hotel in Rio de Janeiro. Yet this is not what this work is about. It is about a never completed housing project on the western outskirts of Rio that is also called Copacabana Palace. "More than 1000 people – 'sem teto, sem terra' – without roof or land – live here in very difficult circumstances and in extreme poverty, threatened by violence and disease".

The pictures, photographer Peter Bauza writes, were taken over a period of eight months. He also notes that in the beginning it wasn't easy to go about this project – he first had to earn the trust of the block leaders. Eventually, he became part of the place, otherwise these pictures could not have been taken.

Flipping through the pages of this classical coffee table book that consists of 200 pages of photographs and one page (actually three pages, one in English, one in German, and one in Portuguese) of textual background information, I'm often not really sure what to think of it. I mean: Why should I look at, for instance, a completely run-down neighbourhood, the shittiest of living circumstances or sleeping people?

I know, I know, photographers are also voyeurs (and the ones who look at photographs often are too) yet it doesn't feel right to look at, say, a blurred photo of a couple making love as part of a documentary project. To be able to take such photographs is not a good enough reason to actually take and publish them. So why am I shown these pictures?

"Anyone who goes there first notices the stench, a mix of sewer, swamp and burnt rubbish. Between the six buildings you come across dead animals, bags of faeces, discarded plastic toys and, every so often, heaps of old rubbish", Peter Bauza writes.

He was most impressed by the resident's will to survive. Most photographs, however, do not show that. Well, how could they anyway? To me, the vast majority of the pictures show more hopelessness than hope.

It goes without saying that the publisher sees this differently. "Peter Bauza's superbly perceptive pictures form a highly poetic tale of their lives, their everyday moments of joy and sadness, their needs and illusions, but also of beauty and strength and the co-existence community that has emerged in these precarious circumstances."

To me, the most convincing pictures are the portraits on the pull-out page in the middle of the book. Here it is clear that there was some collaboration between photographer and the ones portrayed. These people, although they posed, don't look like they want to please. And, that is pretty rare, I think.

Peter Bauza

Copacabana Palace

Edition Lammerhuber, Baden, Austria 2016

Shadows on the mountain range

These photos were taken on 4 October 2016, in the late afternoon, during a rather stiff breeze on the Lukmanier Pass in Southeastern Switzerland.