Magnificent pictures from the Central Park vigil. A must see!
"A touching book portraying the soulful tribute to a man that inspired people's dreams of peace and brotherhood as the antidote to war, racism, and all kind of violence.
The photo reportage of the New York Central Park Vigil (1980) portraying faces and emotions of people and loving fans soon after the death of John Lennon. Pictures of a day that will be remembered as one of the most painful for the world of showbiz and one of the saddest for the history of mankind.
The suffering for the loss of a working class hero, a Siddharta of our time, expression of the universal pain of mankind facing injustice, was also a cry for peace and brotherhood, a cry of a few for all, the urge to recognize the uselessness of guns and wars and join the non-violent revolution."
Luca Mantini - Webmaster of www.johnlennon.it - ph. editor of Imagine Your Dream... A Tribute to John Lennon
Through her, we were there too...
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans", John sang it in a song dedicated to his son Sean, in 1980. He hadn't been playing music five years and he got very excited about starting over again; yet, while he was busy making other plans, the tormentor shot him down, stole his life away.
The Beatles are as part of my youth as of many others' one. John Lennon is the "Modern Man" per excellence, conscious that it's necessary for us all to work for peace, each one in his own field.
"I am a violent man" - he said - "...why not give peace a chance for once?
No message is more relevant today.
This book shows pictures taken by a journalist, not a photographer, at the Vigil held in Central Park (December 1980), dedicated to John Lennon, and the result is extraordinary both under the documentary point of view and the photographic one as well: with just one and a half film, about 50 shots, Fiorella is able to catch and tell facts, gestures, characters and feelings of that Vigil better than a consummate professional photojournalist.
Professionalism actually implies method, craft, experience, shrewdness and stylistic automatisms: a pre-existing know-how which can harness, arm and harden your action. Then you can sharply conceal it (like French school wonderfully does, theorizing or making a practise of image volée, in which the photographer "disappears" and the object of his vision stays alone); or you can make it co-protagonist, "an event inside the event", by imposing your presence and vision (as reporters from the American school do), strongly interacting with their "objects" and making people feel "on stage".
Fiorella heartfully immerses herself, with her eyes wide open and the camera; she does not pre-establish, doesn't want to foresee; she purely and simply reports through her photos. Events guide her steps and she is there, looking and shooting, then looking and shooting again. She does not "disappear" - as Bresson would - does not interphere with reality or modify it - as Bruce Davidson would - she is simply there, one amongst the others, and is not stealing, not standing out or opposing as a professional eyewitness. She shares the experience with the others.
Glances of the photographed people give evidence about it.
Through her, we were there too.
Indeed.
Giovanni Tavano - Publisher, photographer
€ 15,00