Description
With a degree in Philosophy and a major in Psychology and Child Psychoanalysis, Marina Ballo Charmet began to dedicate herself to photography in the mid-1980s while still practicing her profession of child psychotherapist. In her work, the images are never described or analyzed, but rather presented for what they are beyond any possible intentions toward functionality. They are photographs of our daily lives, of what belongs to us peripherally and what we see in passing, like the side of a road, a traffic island, the worn floor of an apartment. Images are portrayed in black and white, as something enigmatic that cannot be easily grasped and revealed because it is removed too quickly. "Con la coda dell’occhio" was conceived in 1992 when Marina Ballo Charmet was invited by the Graz Festival (Austria) to create a work related to the city. It is here that, for the first time, the author decides to position the lens at a child’s eye level, immortalizing glimpses of the urban fabric, sacrificing an elevated viewpoint and resorting to out-of-focus techniques that make it possible for the eye to remove the city and, at the same time, incorporate into the image a sense of dispersion, an undefined absence. In the seventy shots that make up the series, everything that is identifiable as a city disappears. What remain are the foundations of a fragmented urban land, irregular, sometimes craggy like uneven sidewalks, overgrown flower beds and pedestrian areas where cigarette butts are imprisoned. The protagonists are the
areas at the edge of the gaze, the areas of passage, the surfaces seen out of the corner of the eye but framed through the eyes of a child, devoid of codes, rules and conformity.