The Freeman View

Romano Cagnoni part 4

MF: You spent many years living in London, as well as in Tuscany. Has each place affected the way you work?

RC: It was very exciting to arrive in London as a young man from a small Tuscan town near the sea. I had only one Leica. To buy more cameras and lenses that I needed, I did things like the following. I climbed down from the roof of the Dorchester hotel to the window of the apartment of Elisabeth Taylor and her husband, the singer Eddie Fisher, the photographs I took were bought by the Daily Express and used on a big spread. Was I already a photojournalist? Is a Daily Express staff photographer a photojournalist? I learned about journalism from Simon Guttmann, but my most important experience was through everyday life for many years with my departed first wife Berenice Sydney, whose beautiful paintings are in most British museum collections. Conversations with Berenice about visual approach to images were very important to my development as a photographer, beside the enormous quantity of work we helped each other to carry on.

Berenice Sydney, 1972

It was time to return to Tuscany. First, I had an assignment from Time-Life to make a book in Italy. Later I moved back to my old town of Pietrasanta on which I made a book commissioned by the local council. For a long time I had wanted to photograph the quarries and the quarrymen of nearby Carrara, The car company Fiat provided a quite good commission that permitted me to give a long time to the work, which resulted in the book Caro Marmo.

I continued my international photojournalism from my new base of Pietrasanta, moving to different world places with my wife Patti.

Versilia, 1985 Pietrasanta, 1984

Pietrasanta, 1986

Pietrasanta is a well-known working place for international sculptors. Henry Moore, Hans Arp, Marino Marini, Isamu Noguchi and many famous others worked here for many years. Meeting interesting people like them stimulated me to learn more about their art. For a while now I’ve been working on a book I titled Marble, The Material of Art. It will be published next year.

Marble Material of Art 1 Diptych Lucca San Michele

Marble Material of Art 2 Diptych Michelangelo

A work in progress, large format plates Series: “The nature’s brush strokes”

Editions of Romano Cagnoni’s are available directly from his studio, at r.cagnoni@gmail.com For more on Romano, please see the following sites:- http://www.romanocagnoni.com Romano on Facebook

Romano Cagnoni part 3

Since World War II, we hadn’t seen such militarily-caused destruction in Europe like the recent conflict in ex-Yugoslavia. Many attractive buildings, charming old cities were partly destroyed. I had to show the beauty of the architecture and its history to communicate even more the sorry state of its destruction. Only with a large format camera I could have the proper technical resources: correct the convergence lines, control of the perspective, obtain extremely sharp and virtually grain-free negatives. The aim was to have technically perfect architectural photographs of war-damaged sites, intending a disconcerting effect.

War photographed in a large format	Vukovar, 1991	Vukovar, 1991
The aim was to have technically perfect architecture photographs of war-damaged sites, intending a disconcerting effect.	Nustar, 1991	Dubrovnik, 1991

MF: What was your latest show?

RC: I had number of exhibitions in the last few years. The one I am most satisfied with is a retrospective held in Milan at Arengario Palace in the year 2004. My title was “Chiaroscuro.” Beside the international use of the word in its meaning related to the visual arts, chiaroscuro also means, at least in the Italian dictionary, an alternation of changing fortunes from painful to good humour. This title portrays the essence of my work. I have often looked at life with an amused eye, perhaps to compensate for so many years spent in photographing pain. If you can’t cry, you can’t laugh.

Immigrants, Manchester 1971 Churchill's funeral, London 1965

London, 1969 London, 1959

Rome, 1960 England, 1982

London, 1976 Turin, 1978

Japan, 1962 England, 1971

British Museum, London 1967 M. Rothko Chapel, Dallas 1976

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Romano Cagnoni part 2

MF: The photographs you took of Ho Chi Minh were the first taken by a westerner during the Vietnam War. Do you consider that a coup? It certainly seemed like it. How did you make that happen?

RC: Since the fall of the French army at Dien Bien Phu, the western media had tried unsuccessfully to enter North Vietnam. The distinguished journalist James Cameron, television cameramen Malcom Aird and myself were the first non-communist correspondents to obtain an entry-visa in November 1965. Photography was under heavy censorship. Simon Guttman - the man who started Robert Capa in photography - for many years contributor to Picture Post and with whom I had worked together for a number of years in London, providing stories for different English magazine and papers, was the man able to get such a sought-after visa. Indeed, it was a scoop, Life Magazine made a cover of my Ho Chi Minh picture and many world top magazines bought the story. It was fascinating to meet a legendary man like Ho Chi Minh; at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi. He refused to be photographed. I said to the President that people in the west sensitive to justice would have loved to see him in such a good health. He told me that I was an optimist, that optimists make good revolutionaries and that I could photograph him.

Ho Chi Minh and Phan Van Dong, Hanoi, 1965

MF: You’ve covered more than your fair share of armed conflict in your career, yet I remember you saying once that your interests were not those of a war photographer.

RC: The definitions of what kind of photography one is interested in reminds me of an interview between a Life Magazine editor and a young photographer: “Well, do you look at Life?’ “Oh yes,” replied the young photographer, “every day I walk the streets hoping to photograph something significant! Death is significant. Absurdity, love, loneliness and so on are significant. Cartier-Bresson once said, “All photographers have my solidarity, but absolutely none with ‘aestheticians’ who pose ‘belle jeunes filles en fleur’. Another photographer much closer to my generation who defined his work interestingly is Abbas, a friend, who said, “The photojournalist sees beyond himself, not inside himself, and in doing so he is not a prisoner of reality – he transcends it”……. Is there a creative photojournalist? Or a fine art photographer? Wedding photographer? Advertising? Fashion? Is it not enough just to be a photographer? Like painter, sculptor, architect, writer, builder, carpenter. War is a fascinating, terrible situation. As a child I ran away with my family the day before the Nazis murdered all the villagers on the mountains in Tuscany, in the village where we were refugees to escape the allied bombings. In photographing conflicts I always had the tendency to take the side of the poor.

Biafra, 1968

MF: While we’re on the subject, in two of your war stories you took different-from-expected approaches. I’m thinking of Chechnya and Croatia.

RC: The Chechnya photographs were the first time a photographer set up a studio on the front line. The idea came from my wife Patti. We departed from our Tuscan house loaded with flashlights, tripods and reflectors. We reached Grozny where a few badly armed Chechens were resisting the powerful Russian army and air force. These warriors were a race of people about whom writers like Tolstoy, Lermentov, Pushkin had written enticing stories. Patti and I, fascinated by such men, set up a studio in Grozny during the fighting.

The Warriors The first time a photographer sets up a studio with flash lights ina war zone during fighting, 1995.

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