AMEDEO CASTELLANI : AN APPRECIATION OF SORTS

1979 Exhibition Notes

As I remember it, I met Amedeo in Rome some five, maybe six years ago. It was a concert held at a small school hall just off the Campo dei Fiori.

Amedeo was into music then and used to play the saxophone. But he was best known among musicians as a talented young photographer who had done some fine and very different portraits of an American ‘avantgarde’ composer, Alvin Curran.

I was one of the performers at the concert. At the time, I wasn’t interested in Amedeo or his photographs. I was interested in the attractive girl he’d brought with him. Her name, I was to find out, was Alessandra and she had wide hazel eyes and olive skin and a smile that glittered like gold at the end of a rainbow.

After the concert I was introduced to both of them. Together, we went for coffee at the nearby piazza where the bronze statue of the heretical monk Giordano Bruno stands on the place he was burned at the stake and stares down disdainfully at the dope-heads, the petty hustlers and the teenage whores who hang out there.

I went out with Alessandra for a while after that evening but it was another year before I saw Amedeo again.

I came across him in one of the streets off the Lungotevere that were the backdrop of many of his photographs. As usual, there were a couple of battered 35mm cameras slung ‘round his neck. Over a couple of coffees, this time in a bar on Via dei Coronari, he showed me a dozen or so contact sheets filled with his work.

The first shot I saw was a haunting black and white portrait of the statue in Campo dei Fiori.

Amedeo grew up in Rome. His photographs are, therefore, a realistic view, unblurred by too much sentimentality, of a city in poor repair with the graffiti from a generation of social unrest daubed on its walls. Even the picturesque Tiber is just another muddy, polluted river tugging at the decaying hulls of the house-boats moored alongside its weed choked banks.

His people are subdued and reflective, no longer care-free. Times are changing quickly; “ormai, la dolce vita e’ finita” (Now, the sweet life is over).

Nevertheless, there are still moments when the sad streets come alive with flea markets and fire-eaters and costumed Neapolitan musicians, when school-children transform the walls of an abandoned palazzo into a fantastic multi-coloured mural.

Inevitably, there are images of the Catholic Church – a church which Amedeo sees as out of touch with the spiritual needs and modern dilemmas of its faithful. ‘Elemosina per la Madonna del Riposo, chi ben vive, ben muore’ reads the inscription on a marble alms box outside one church, while outside another the doors have been defaced with slogans which, in turn, have been obliterated by blotches of white paint.

Amedeo also catches the dime-a-dozen clergymen in the awkward moments when they are confronted with the troubled cries of their flock like, in one shot, the diminutive monsignor who ignores the call for ‘Aborto Libero’, ‘Free Abortion’, painted on a shop front.

However, his best photograph is an irreverent parody. A tableful of bishops, priests, a couple of altar boys and a Swiss Guard are found earnestly engaged in a card game; (they were, in fact, only extras waiting for their call on a soundstage at Cinecitta’).

Amedeo lives in London now where he is beginning to make a name for himself in the precarious and competitive world of photo-journalism. We see each other a couple of times a month. Sometimes we talk about Rome. Sometimes we don’t talk about Rome at all. But I’m glad he has these photographs. After all, photographs are more durable, and not as illusive as memories.

Oh Alessandra.

Creed O’Hanlon

Brighton 1979