Eighteen minutes to talk about...
to talk, to try to talk about the good use of the world when,
a short distance from here,
we have damaged Liguria, Genoa.
Eighteen minutes not to talk about photography
but to talk, to try to convince you, if I can,
of how small and big stories,
can bring a small social change
and change not the world but our worlds.
Now, 17 minutes and 30 seconds to tell you about the birth of my idea,
the foundation of Shoot4Change, how I had it, how I developed it,
how it is growing and how it is consolidating.
Shoot4Change was actually born almost by chance -
as it often happens to understand in retrospective.
It was born as a blog.
With an old expertise,
an old personal story of blogging and travel photography,
I started a new one after the earthquake in L'Aquila,
and just on the eve of the World March for Peace and Non-violence,
two years ago,
blogging on the social change potential of the great photographs of the past.
In a short time,
a community started to develop, even if I didn't feel its presence.
At the same time
as the World March for Peace and Non-Violence
started from Oakland two years ago,
I was contacted by the organizers of the march from Oakland,
and they asked me to cover the event of the march while passing by Rome.
Having other parallel lives -
because Shoot4Change is my second parallel life.
Sometimes I feel not so much like Clark Kent and Superman
but more like Donald Duck or Goofy
and their undercover alter ego for the parallel lives.
So they ask me to cover the march but I was not available that day in Rome,
and so I published a post that I titled,
probably in a manner even a little too provocative,
"Call to the Photographic Weapons".
See how this oxymoron often returns in our terminology.
Shoot4Change is already an oxymoron
because in English shoot means at the same time to take a picture
but also to shoot,
and change is both the social change but also money,
so much so that during the first days of life of our network,
it became a network of volunteers from all over the world,
I had a big peak of accesses from Washinghton!
Evidently they feared that we were a group of mercenaries
shooting for money!
Then they reassured themselves
and realized that we are actually just poor street photographers.
So, I made this call to the photographic weapons,
and in a few hours
My mailbox was literally overloaded with messages
and in a few days we managed to cover not only Rome, not only Milan
but most of Italy down to Lecce.
New York, San Francisco followed,
until we reach the end in Argentina,
on the peaks of the mountains of Argentina where the march ended its journey.
Well, there I understood that maybe something could be done.
I understood that people wanted to go down the street
and tell their own story.
Their stories, from their own point of view.
So we started, we kept blogging,
asking people to not only to tell us their stories of proximity -
one of our slogans, of our claims is "Shoot Local, Change Global" -
but to come and do it with us,
or to ask us for help when they were unable to do it alone.
One of the messages that I try to convey, that we try to convey,
with our activities and with our reportages
is not only to tell a story
but not to pretend that we must necessarily emulate
the great photographer of the National Geographic -
by the way many of them are our voluntary members,
from Ed Kashi in New York for National Geographic USA
to Alfonso Rodriguez National Geographic Spain
and other great professionals,
but that with our motto “Shoot Local Change Global”
it is enough to go down to the street,
perhaps armed just with a compact camera, a smartphone,
and tell the stories of proximity.
What we called Social Photography Km0.
Hence the claim Shoot Local, Change Global.
The aim, or rather at the end the result that we have achieved
and that we are achieving and that we are consolidating,
is an invitation to raise awareness, to observe what happens,
to attentively look at the reality that surrounds us,
asking people to take an active part in a social change.
For us, our concept of social photography is not only to stimulate,
to give a punch in the stomach of the readers
by leveraging the classic aesthetics of pain,
the drama of images, of tragedies.
We ask for a contribution.
And above all, we try to tell those positive stories,
ordinary or extraordinary, that in our small way behind the house,
bring a relief,
a positive change in situations of social distress.
There are a myriad of stories.
Many small or very small or tiny one like, in some cases,
those of associations of volunteers that nobody knows.
We tell them for free,
we lend ourselves for free to make professional photographic services
to those who cannot afford it.
So, we bring to the public attention in a logic of true citizen journalis,
those stories that are not considered remunerative
by the information Main Stream, and thay are many.
Some people accused us at the beginning, above all,
of being the ones who work for free and who disrupt the market,
and destroy photo agencies or newspapers because they work for free.
That's not the case. I often answer these people:
"Would you ever tell the story of a small homeless shelter?"
They say "No." "And why not?"
"Because no one would buy that story."
"Would you ever go into a refugee shelter?"
"No, I wouldn't do that because no one would buy me those pictures."
We do it.
Over time I developed this concept of Crowd Photography.
I often remember, I often quote on such occasions,
the old and famous African saying, "If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far away, go with others".
A photographer is enough to tell a story,
two are better off and three, maybe four are even better.
Then it starts to get messy, of course.
But the more the better,
because each story can be seen with 360 degrees angles,
360 points of view to be told.
And this enriches the story.
The concept of Crowd Photography
is a concept according to which almost all our projects -
we try, we don't always succeed -
are the result of the creative contribution
of people who maybe don't know each other.
And believe me, our method is growing and consolidating,
not only with photographers, but with creatives of all kinds.
We have painters and designers who draft our logos and graphics.
We have musicians who compose and give us the music for our clips.
We have journalists, we have writers.
We have all those who want to put ideas online and share them,
and add a piece to the story with their ideas.
We try to be unconventional in our stories.
Also here, we often succeed, sometimes we fail.
For example -
this is just an example out of many -
can a photo of a horse, or a series of photos of undernourished horses,
tell us about the economic recession in Europe?
Yes, it does. This is a reportage that one of our Italian members,
who has lived for many years, he's very young, in Ireland,
has never been able to place in any Irish magazine,
because it seems in Ireland
they don't want to talk about these social stories
because, say the magazines, they give a distorted image of Ireland.
He discovered that one of the unexpected consequences of the economic recession
is that many Irish,
who have typically always been very keen
to buy horses,
sell their horses in some fairs
run by the Irish Mob in the suburbs of Dublin.
And they sell for 20, 30, 40 euros
already malnourished horses.
Obviously the kids, driven by enthusiasm,
buy them or barter them for mobile phones,
except after two or three days,
no longer being able to afford the management,
not knowing obviously where to put them at home,
abandon them in the suburbs of Dublin.
It's a story no one wanted to buy.
We published it. It's been on the internet,
and it's an unconventional way to tell an episode of world news,
unfortunately, like the economic recession.
But we do not only tell unhappy stories but also very positive ones.
This is one of a thousand examples of projects that we keep every day.
Like this story of the Liberi Nantes,
a sports club we've been following for years in Rome.
It is a club composed of political refugees and asylum seekers,
which uses sport to free them of the memory of the tragedies
from which they escaped.
We entered a refugee in Rome, La Casa di Giorgia,
a refugees shelter that gives hospitality to women asylum seekers,
and we discovered that these women, these girls,
had never been in the center of Rome despite having been in Rome for months,
in some cases even a year,
for fear of traffic, the city, pollution and Italians.
They got themselves imprisoned in thei rown cage,
which they had built themselves, of commonplaces.
So we divided them into various groups,
we gave each one of them compact cameras,
some of our girl photographers were accompanying them,
also for a matter of greater ease
in reaching empathy between teacher and pupil.
We taught them roughly and quickly
to use a camera
and we went around with them over a month and a every weekend in Rome,
literally taking them with us, dragging them with us.
They had a great time.
The camera with which they then portrayed their Rome
was a filter that made them focus on looking at Rome through a box.
The thesis of our project
is that a city you know is a city you recognize over time
and a city you recognize, through your own photographs,
is a city in which you find a level of trust
that allows you to recreate and regain possession
of some social dynamics and, eventually, inclusion.
The small photographic exhibition we launched
after this project has gone around Rome and is starting to go around Italy now.
It was a huge success.
Many other centers are asking to replicate.
These little photographs may have changed the world.
Now I'll try, in the few minutes I have left -
I don't see it on the screen anymore, seven minutes and 48 seconds -
to dismantle this concept.
That's probably not true,
I told you something maybe stupid, photography doesn't change the world.
Rather…
Take this person, for example.
I met him in Cairo, in the "City of the Dead".
Someone may know it,
it is the old monumental cemetery in Cairo
where over the years hundreds of thousands of people,
mostly from the first waves of Palestinian refugees,
years ago,
found accommodation in and among the tombs,
in the mausoleums of the old Cairo monumental cemetery,
creating a real society within Cairo.
Cairo considers these people to be outcasts of society,
considers them immoral because they live among the dead.
They have recreated their own ecosystem,
their own social environment in absolute equilibrium.
Yet they do not exist for others. These people live there.
This man had started as the guardian of this mausoleum
and over the years he moved in with his family.
I took a picture,
it started going around the internet.
It eventually didn't change his world or the world in general:
I came back and he's still there.
These people, too, live in the City of the Dead
and when I asked her to take her picture
this old lady with her grandchild, she posed next to this tomb,
let's say the family tomb in their courtyard.
I asked if he was their relative,
and they said:
"No, but we've lived here for many years,
it's as if he were.
We'd like to have a portrait with him."
This photograph hasn't changed their world,
they still live there among the dead.
This other person, moving on, is Sergei.
Sergei lives in a homeless shelter.
From a semantic point of view, this is something that makes me uneasy.
Do we really need to define a person for what he doesn't have
instead of what he has: homeless.
He is Russian.
For many years now he's been on the street
and no longer speaks to or of his family.
When he asked me for a portrait,
he asked me to do it in half
because he says that he's missing something in his life. He's missing a lot.
I came home, he's still there.
This picture, probably beautiful or not, has gone around the internet;
it has not changed his world.
Carmine also lives in that homeless shelter.
He lives in his own world:
he says he grows bees, loves his bees.
He no longer talks about his family,
he closed himself in an embarrassing silence
when asked about his story.
This photo hasn't changed his world, he still lives on the street.
There are many examples, I need to speed up a little bit.
These are photos of the boats
with which the refugees from the Middle East arrive in Lampedusa.
And they keep coming every day.
They escape from their countries, from their human and social tragedies.
This photo hasn't changed their world and they keep coming,
yet I told their story. It served no other purpose.
This person lives in a refugee camp
in Bourj el-Barajneh, on the outskirts of Beirut.
It's a huge refugee camp,
but it's not mapped in the city of Beirut map.
He sells in the street, in the heat.
He goes around the camp selling ice creams.
He sweats, he sweats a lot.
He walks and sells ice cream
in a place where everyone grows up without social rights.
This photo hasn't changed his world.
He's still there selling right now, well now he's sleeping,
but tomorrow morning he'll get up and will continue to sell ice cream.
In the same camp I met this little girl.
For her, that Refugee Camp, she told me - that is, they translated -
was her big playground.
She found it immense, enormous.
She doesn't know she is growing up without any rights
in a place not even mapped, as I told you, in the city of Beirut.
She'll probably be there all her life, without rights.
Not only has this photo not changed her world now,
it will not have changed it in the next 20, 30 or 40 years either.
So, their world hasn't changed. Photography probably didn't do any good.
My photographs have been a hole in the water
and probably simply fulfilled their task of tickling my egocentricity
in showing them to you,
a very typical characteristic of us photographers,
to be rather egocentric.
They are still there.
What has probably changed, however,
is in the person who took the photograph.
Because I'm back, I know those stories now.
I know they'll get up tomorrow morning and will still be there.
I know that there is someone
who still lives around the corner of my house.
I know that if I only decide to go down
there are a thousand situations of social distress
that I can and must tell.
So, you now...
Somehow I fooled you.
I told you that social photography doesn't change the world
but now you know those stories too.
Because, as we often say,
there are stories that must and can be told.
And it's probably the narration of these little big stories,
asking people to go down the street and tell them with us,
that changes the world eventually.
This is our concept of good use of the world.
It's good use not of naive people.
We are not dreamers, we are not idealists, we are not activists,
we do not take part in social changes,
political movements, etc.
We tell stories.
We do it in a neutral and free way for those who cannot afford it.
Because there are stories that must be told,
stories that want to be told and stories that have to be known.
Thank you.
(Applause)