There are strange lost worlds, whispering under the eaves and in rooms always kept closed, footfalls and distant voices, almost heard, reminiscence living as the dream lives inside the dreamer. When winter comes we think of spring again, of brighter days; winter is the closing season, and if this work is by no means unique in its conception, its nostalgia, there are few photographers that so effectively create a world as Paolo Ventura does, certainly not with the emotional resonance he manages here. Of course these scenes, inside (and outside) of time, are studio fictions, elaborated in every detail by Ventura himself – nothing left to chance, agonising over the ideal vantage point, the quality of light, colour palette; their illusion is deft, but self-conscious. Attention to the pictures, our “reading” of them, flickers between the complete (and gratifyingly detailed) apparent reality that each sustains and the realisation that the pictures are a visual slight of hand – a trick of memory, the coherence of which obviously dissolves on closer inspection: memory cannot be trusted. It is this tension in looking at the images that makes them so effective, how he positions them right on the edge of believability and never any further, never making them real worlds in the kind of cinematic way that other artists have done. There are entirely contained narrative reveries, meaning of course that their world is contained, because the images have a fascinatingly open-ended quality, as if these fragments could indeed be your own memories, had circumstance been different, that you might have lived other lives, in other places, all knotted together with the present. If it is not a life that has been lived, then it is a life that could have been lived.To see more of Ventura’s Winter Stories – and his other series War Souvenir – visit his website.
