Mushrooms and fishes, carnivorous plants and insects, food and kitchen’s tools. Hands, eyes that meet, lights, smoke and shadows. Images carefully designed and spots stolen in some of the most famous London clubs. What moves, then stops, and what is steady, starts moving. For a moment. That is the exact bit that Enrico Policardo grabs and impresses in his pictures.
Let’s start with presentations: we already know you are a talented Italian photographer, based in London for some years. Tell us something more about you…
I moved to London in 2010, almost seven years ago. It seems like, or maybe it is, a long time ago.
I photograph. I always thought I had to earn a living in order to define myself as a photographer, and the fact that finally I made it, could be considered a privilege. I think it’s a huge benefit to have the possibility to improve my sensibility, researching about the notion of “unnecessary”, dealing with aesthetics, in a philosophical way, without worrying to make ends meet. I don’t want to start a useless debate about the nature of an art. I just want to say that I feel very lucky. Obviously, at the beginning, I experienced many different jobs to pay the expenses of my passion. I worked in a café for years when I was in Italy; after that, I worked for different companies here in London (American Apparel among them) and as a chef too, thanks to my love for food and cooking (these are subjects I often photographed with my mentor Francesco Caio).
How did you approach photography? What inspired you?
I think my father has been responsible for this. He wasn’t a professional, but photography and painting were something he used to practice. I have never had a strong flair for art and a great dedication for drawing and I think I have always had a futuristic curiosity for technical stuff.
My first camera was yellow, a Topolino’s camera; I have never made it work, maybe some pieces were lost, I don’t remember. Since then, I have always handled different cameras. When I was 14 I bought an Olympus Superzoom film camera, a real turning point for me. I have always considered photography as a job, a know-how, something that is handmade rather than artistic. I think art comes when the technical act is completely assimilated or, from another point of view, when technic is irrelevant and the expression really counts: a blurry shot, overexposed, that does not follow any compositional rule, a drawing on a napkin, some music recorded on an audiotape, a video recorded with a phone.
You work with Roberto Rosolin, the art director at Fabric, since 2013: you create the images for the graphics of this famous English club. How did this collaboration start?
We both are from Gorizia, but this is not relevant. Of course, we already knew each othe, but we’ve never been friends. I pursued my personal way, made my studies, lived in Venice and moved to London in 2010. Meanwhile, I continued to take photos, record videos. We started to see each other here in London, and we became good friends because of our point of view about art and aesthetics. We found out that in different times we investigated some identical places from our town; we took pictures of the same corners, but with different perspectives and purposes.
It’s strange the way you think to know the places you’re from, just because you spent an entire life there, and suddenly looking through someone other’s eyes will shatter your certainties. This could be applied to a lot of things. The only way to understand what is in someone’s mind is the dialogue, the confrontation.
These works combine, as we said before, photography and graphics and contribute to create the identity of a product. What is the common denominator that make you recognize and attribute them to the same project?
For Roberto, Fabric was already a benchmark from a graphical standpoint, thanks to the work started by Jon Cook and the Village Green Studio. Fabric has the capability to impose his aesthetics with coherence and tenacity though years. The Flyers published by the end of every month were a sort of cult to be collected. This was possible thanks to musical and marketing choices. This work is not one-way oriented. It is not only about graphics, photos, music or lights. The set of these elements create the real identity of Fabric. Fabric is a hub, a benchmark, not only for the musical and artistic community, but for London too; you should take a look to public reactions when the club was closed last year.
I do not treat this project as a work for a customer: what I do is just trying to channel all this energy, all this inspiration, towards a research instead of a defined goal. It could be a simple flyer, an online banner or whatever it is.
In the Bubbles series, time stops, impressing memories that are almost invisible to the naked eye, and revealing details that may vary according to the light and position of your eye over the object. Can you tell us how do you create these images?
These are images shot with a high-speed shutter. The higher the speed of the subject the greater the difficulty to impress the moment in a picture. These are soap bubbles, which do not cost that much and do not need great precautions to be photographed, but if we think about bullet shots, or any other subject that moves at a high speed, things start to complicate. Let’s say that with soap bubbles we armed ourselves with patience, and we blew a few thousand of them before we were satisfied with the result.
You studied cinematography at DAMS. Does this education have a sort of influence on your way of designing a frame? If yes, in what way?
I forget very often that who’s looking at a picture, then expects to look at something finished, deduced from its original context, from the space and the time in which it was conceived. I think this idea is due to the fact that I consider the photo like one of the 36 frames of a film.
If we consider any action and film it, there will be a frame that has more significance than any other does. If we think of a pot that falls, it will probably be the moment it touches the ground and crashes. Or maybe not. Why should that moment, compared to the others, be the one in which that action reaches the maximum of its expressiveness? I believe this is my approach.
I do not have the presumption of showing something definitive to who looks at my photos, as if a frame were necessarily more important than the others. All moments are essential, or at least for those who experience it. If not, would our life be more important in certain times and less important in others? I do not mean to say that we should photograph each moment of our life, indeed, probably the opposite. We should simply learn to live our lives to the fullest, by observing ourselves and the others not no paternalistic eye, but rather with simple and genuine curiosity and tenderness.
For some time, you collaborate with another club in London: Oval Space / the Pickle Factory. It is a story about nightlife made of fleeting and sincere moments; an unbiased, detached, look that shows the reality for what it is, and not how it is expected to be. What are the pictures, situations, moments you prefer to depict in your stories?
OS and PF contacted me because they wanted to investigate and portray a different side of nightlife, of clubbing, and night out in general. If it is true that people go out basically for having fun and socialize, it is also true that there is a less obvious side behind this. It conveys microelements, details, looks that we can only perceive if we allow a break and observe what happens in ourselves and consequently around us. I like to photograph these pauses, which are not meant as stillness but as suspension of judgment and awareness of the presence of a camera and a photographer. Life does not happen for the camera or in front of it. It happens and that’s it, and the idea that this flow is altered by my presence, as a photographer, somehow falsifies the natural course of reality. The interaction between a photographer and a subject is a subject that intrigued me since I was studying documentary filmmaking at university. In front of a lens, our attitude changes dramatically. As photographers or video-makers we can try to hide our presence (long-focus lens, telephoto lens, concealment) or participate in the action being aware of the alterations that this choice (our presence) introduces to the system. I think this second approach is incredibly interesting from a relational point of view but also very difficult to pursue. As in any relationship, it happens that we move through a mutual initial distrust, which finally ends up in an unnatural behaviour about what we say, what we do and think. Photographing is not just the collection of someone’s images. It is more about building a relationship, that can be long or short depending on the circumstances.
It is a project very different from those realized for Fabric: still frames, carefully designed and composed, contrasting with extremely dynamic images, characterised by a manifold environment. Which type of approach you think it describes better your process?
I’m not into quotes, but I can answer with this one from Jean Renoir: ”Un réalisateur ne fait qu’un seul film dans sa vie. Puis, il le casse en plusieurs morceaux et il le refait”
Last question: what about your next projects?
I have different things in mind, commercial and personal projects mostly. Just to give you a hint of that, I’d like to start working on human being, about his more physical and spiritual form. This is something that I experienced not too much until today and now I feel I want to explore.