Psalm
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Numbered edition of 300
128 pages
18 x 27 cm
Softcover
Witty Kiwi Books, 2020
Massimiliano Tommaso Rezza
30,00 €
The poem Psalm by Paul Celan is a sorrowful chant that adverts to a state of total loss of orientation. The sky under which men live is empty. Nobody answers our call.
When the whole world is threatened we cease to rely only on reason for the causes of danger, but we seek in the first place words or images that may express our condition of dismay. Man finds, thus, a different language, a poetic one that is no longer an expression of certainty: that certainty that the current crisis has dismantled . The formulation of the question has become a chant. Words and images tremble, they are moved, they are honest and authentic vehicles of tragic emotional lucidity. From a system of certainties of technical-scientific thought man arrives at personal, intimate, human language, which is an elegy, a lamentation, a psalm.
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Massimiliano Tommaso Rezza describes himself as a “late bloomer”. Before photography, Rezza studied to become a pharmaceutical chemist, and worked for the army, and then in private pharmacies, for over a decade. “I always practiced art though,” says Rezza, who at the time was experimenting with found images from the internet. “I had this urge to express myself, and the more I got bored with my job, the more I got into practicing art.”
In 2005, aged 37, the Italian photographer decided to enrol onto a three-week seminar on visual culture, led by artist Katharina Sieverding, who advised Rezza to start taking his own photographs. “Meeting her literally changed my life,” he says. “I loved the loneliness one faces when looking into the viewfinder, a real room where the world would appear isolated.” Rezza wanted to pursue photography as a career, but needed more technical knowledge. When he returned to Italy, he worked night shifts at a pharmacy to make the time and earn the money for photography courses.
