by Azzurra Immediato
_
“A biography is not an intelligent animal. It’s not serious stuff… As long as you are alive at least, as most of the time it is you who write it. So let’s start by calling it an autobiography.
Maybe it starts to make a little sense when you’re gone, because, if it’s really needed, others will take care of it. May it happen or not you’ll never know. And this is the real advantage: having no news of yourself…”
This is what Efrem Raimondi wrote a few years ago in what he called his ‘Controversial Blog’ and today, quick as a shutter, the news has arrived: Efrem is no longer with us. His last shot, shared on Instagram, portrays Vasco Rossi and carries the unmistakable signature of Raimondi. A photo taken from afar, that keeps our eyes at a poetic distance from the scene. Efrem Raimondi’s photography has always been defined as portrait, a definition that never suited the photographer who, in truth, has never liked boxes or grids, neither those built for photographic composition nor those designed by society, by visual culture or manuals, genres, types. Efrem Raimondi was only interested in one thing: Making Photography. In doing so, however, he knew how to return the soul of the portrayed in a unique way. Those who know the history of portraits, either pictorial, sculptural or photographic, recognize in Raimondi’s shots something that has nothing to do with official aesthetics, with the glossy portrait. Just look at the photograph, shared a week ago, of Mario Draghi. Irony and Poetry follow each other, just like in life, in every single shot, in every portrait that has marked Efrem Raimondi’s career.
And perhaps he was right, the real advantage is to have no news of ourselves, but to leave traces in the folds of the unspoken, in the shadows and in the light that the faces and the stories they tell carry with them.
February 16, 2021
