Immagini fuori posto. Nodi e intrecci iconografici

The essay summarizes a field research work started in 1998 in Calamonaci (AG). Through the discovery of the diversity and alterity of the endotic, between the known and the familiar, continuously discovered and enriched, the author develops a careful analysis of family images that become the premise and purpose of the research. This field research involved about 300 families and then became a photographic exhibition, with a catalog, experienced, shared and participated by the community. In this work, the author has adopted a participatory research method trying to understand how the photographic image, almost always thought of as the referent of the reality represented, with each new vision changes direction, angle, framing. It is a vision that changes, that changes over time and that looks more like a prism with many faces than a two dimensional mirror. Photography is the only means that allows the dead to “last” in the realm of the living again. The family members, in their interior conversation, then turn to the photo of the deceased, "û quatru"(the painting). We have testimony of real "larària" who collect images of the deceased belonging to the close family circle. The images of the dead become cenotaphs for the dead. In the "larària" there are therefore those knots and those intertwining between iconography and oral memory that through continuous references to this object-person that have become the photographs, the non sense of death finds meaning.