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A photograph should command respect. Not by its excellence, nor by its often suspect attempt to charm, but by its presence, which should contain a comprehensive and credible proposition. It should not allow the audience to doubt the sincerity of its intensions. It should not expose a photographer who doubts. It should not leave room for its time and space to come under suspicion. Then the audience, whether or not the result has led them to an epiphany, will respectfully bow to an honorable and dynamic presence well able to express an affirmation. The understanding of the significance of time and space in photography is important to the understanding of the catastrophic effect of photographic doubt. Furthermore, this observation, as with all the others, can be applied (possibly with minor changes) to every art form. Thus, the brush stroke on a painting should enliven the artist’s decision to leave his mark or the sudden entrance of the wind section of an orchestra leave the listener in any doubt that it came at just the right moment. The viewer should, in effect, identify with the photographer, and click the shutter with him saying “I too was there”.
Nor does it make any sense for the conscientious or ambitious photographer to attempt to pre-impose these criteria onto his photographs. It is sufficient that he is able to recognize them when by fortuitous circumstance they emerge in his work. Besides, everything that can be said about a photograph discreetly bows and retreats in the face of two paramount moments: that in which the photographer decides to click the shutter and that in which his photograph communicates for the first time with a refined and sensitive observer. This is the only way in which a new world is born and souls are found to inhabit it. The only way, finally, for a photographer to successfully create his work is to continue to work, multiplying the traces of the photographed world in his collection, and for the audience to thirstily seek out any such tracks..... Pl.Rivellis