Mario Dondero
Galleria ca’ di Fra’/Galleria Massimo Minini
Mario Dondero, born in Milan in 1928, is a press photographer. His simultaneous—but belated—presence in two art galleries says something about the art system and its need to rediscover expressive currents buried in history, given the lack of anything truly new within the contemporary artistic panorama. This nostalgic operation gives us, in Dondero’s case, a protagonist of the image, but it also tells us that at this point there is no longer any boundary between the art world and that of photography, since Dondero proudly states that he is “simply” a press photographer and that his profession is photojournalism; that is, shooting images for newspapers—those papers that, around the mid-1960s, often sought recourse in the strength of the image rather than that of the word. And so his images contain nothing “artistic,” and nothing conceived for the art market, which now appropriates all this with the clear intention of constructing new myths and thereby expanding its own possible territory of activity. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless it misses the heart of Dondero’s work, the ethical character that can be glimpsed in every shot, whether of Milan in the 1950s, Rome and la dolce vita in the ’60s, Paris with its political upheavals in the ’60s and ’70s, or Africa in the second half of the ’70s.
Dondero was an acute portraitist of the Italian writers and artists of the period—Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, Jannis Kounellis and Alberto Burri, among others—and of the French intelligentsia embodied by the likes of Louis Althusser and Jean Genet. Especially telling are the group portraits shot in the literary cafés and restaurants where these intellectuals used to gather. Dondero’s approach was deliberately “low-key,” without any type of visible rhetoric: These are “stolen” shots in the purest tradition of photojournalism. And this is precisely where the ethical heart of these works resides. In fact, Dondero seems to not want photography to veer from the task of “bearing witness” that it has had from the beginning, and his example does not seem to presage any of the questions about the nature of photography that his friend Ugo Mulas and many others would address in the ’70s. On the contrary, Dondero represents the “certainty” of photography, as opposed to its self-interrogatory mode, which opened the way for the medium’s entry into the art system. During a conversation on the occasion of one of these exhibitions, Dondero said that he cannot shoot unless there is a sort of empathy, unless he “feels a bit of love” for the person or thing whose image he is stealing. This attitude can be recognized in his choice to bear witness to the European left through the observation of the thinkers and artists who contributed to it, or even simply of the social situations in which they flourished—and thereby to convey his love for photography. This is a far cry from the stance of the “artist who uses photography”—a relationship of explicit detachment. That’s fine too, but it’s important to be aware of the difference.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.