There is an Italian photographer who is the only one, along with Cartier-Bresson, about whom Sir E.H. Gombrich has written, whose photographs have been described as ‘exceptional’ by F. Zeri, who is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic. Yet, the motto nemo propheta in patria fits him like a glove, because in Italy he remains very little known. His name is Vasco Ascolini and he was born in Reggio Emilia in 1937.

In the 1970s Ascolini attended lectures at the University of Parma, where American photography was rediscovered and people such as Mulas, Veronesi and Ghirri gravitated. When he began to collaborate permanently with the municipal theatre of his city, in parallel with his commission work, he embarked on a path of comparison between the language of photography and that of theatre, and moving on the basis of the theoretical reflections that Mulas himself had carried out on this theme, anticipating the Verifiche (Verifications), Ascolini sanctioned its irreducibility. However, proposing a critique of the complex concept of “true theatre photography” expressed by Mulas as the point of maximum approximation of the two languages, because it is still inadequate, Ascolini completely recreates the scenic event. The photographs of a performance by Lindsay Kemp in 1979 are defined by H. Gernsheim as “superbly expressionist”, and are the starting point of a completely personal and unmistakable style. Forcing the possibilities of the medium, he pushes the grain of the film, extremes the black and white tones, brings bodies closer to the lens and applies unexpected cuts to them, leaving much of the print to absolute black. The instinct of the shot and the rewriting in the darkroom influence each other, resulting in images of great formal balance played on asymmetries.

The subject of Ascolini’s photographs is always man, not here understood as a metaphorical expression of the human condition, but as an individual who, playing the role of actor on stage, is physically realised. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Ascolini devoted himself to dance and mimicry, the scenic arts in which speech is eliminated and everything is left to the body. In these images, through the occupation of the print up to the edges by the figures, man dominates the photographic space and becomes its measure, transfiguring himself. The blackness that opposes it defines it and also plays a perceptive psychological role, which is fundamental from the point of view of visual dynamics. On these figures, however, the erosion of the halftones and the merging, in the black, of the background with the shadows also generates an ambiguity between the living body and the statue that cites the poetics of Man Ray.

In the mid-1980s, Ascolini’s relationship with the theatre came to an end, and the photographer began to devote himself to an entirely different subject: architecture and historical statuary. The caesura, however, is only apparent. The stylistic features of the theatre are transposed onto stone and marble, halls and gardens, framed in an unusual way and sunk into blacks whose depth is freed from perspective flatness. In Ascolini’s interpretation of this, a very important influence intervenes, that of Giorgio de Chirico and Metaphysics. While remaining faithful to reality and the intrinsic characteristics with which the photographic medium relates to it, he succeeds in restoring in these images the atmospheres and sensations generated by the great painter’s paintings and which he himself theorised in his numerous writings. In Ascolini’s places, the human figure disappears, and, reversing the ambiguity of some of his theatre pictures, it is now the sculptures that appear human with subtle artifice, peeping out from behind a wall or showing their silhouette; everything is “calm and silent”, but this atmosphere coexists with a subtle restlessness. Even enigmatic combinations of objects, often depicted by de Chirico, are caught in reality by Ascolini in an alienating way and, as A. Scharf, ‘if we were to look at Ascolini’s subjects from life, they might look completely different from how they appear in his photographs’. If it is natural for the camera to isolate objects or recontextualise them, uncommon is the ability to lose their meaning and function in order to translate them into something else, something new, to recreate them.

Even the broad and absolute blacks, probably the most characteristic stylistic element of the photographer from Reggio Emilia, although formally distant from the clarity of Metaphysical Art, are here functional to the same logic: by hiding a part of the framed reality, often in a forced way, they increase the feeling of unease for what we are not allowed to see, for an absence that is not due – as already happened in many theatre photographs -, for something that seems to want to escape our perception. It is by leaving the door of reality ajar that Ascolini revives our imaginative capacity and prompts us to delve into the unconscious and memory.