Photo Profile: Giovanni Savino

I am a well-traveled renaissance man, who was born in Florence, Italy and calls New York City home.

I worked covering hard news worldwide for the past thirty years, collaborating with the greatest names in journalism from whom I learned many technical and editorial skills that help me tell visual stories today.

I discovered photography not through a brownie camera received as a present in my infancy but rummaging inside an old shoebox full of yellowing pictures on my grandparents’ kitchen table.

My grandparents were born out of extreme poverty at the beginning of the 20th century in the malaria-ridden swamps of southern Tuscany. Their pictures quickly became for me a portal to travel to a different era, to a different dimension. They became visual corroboration to the oral history I heard over and over around a bowl of roasted chestnuts we used to eat together, while reminiscing, in the long winter evenings.

I started learning visual story telling, as a child, at the Uffizi, in Florence, where I was fortunate enough to gain access out of public hours, by knowing someone who worked there, and I could admire many master painters in the silence of those empty galleries.

Later on, I absorbed photo and lighting techniques in the many the years I assisted, while traveling the world together, a CBS News senior cameraman. He would use very basic and unsophisticated illumination tools to achieve extremely sophisticated effects, while always repeating his mantra:” if you light it properly, it shouldn’t look lit”.

My passion for photography is about documenting and preserving oral culture and creating visual instruments of knowledge, anti-dogmatic and open to diverse interpretations.

Images become a mnemonic anchor to past events and protagonists, they become a way to get closer, to better understand what it meant to be there, years, decades, after the fact, while still allowing the viewers to process what is depicted based on their subjective perception of reality and history.

Since 1987, whenever I was not covering hard news, I dedicated a lot of time and efforts to researching and documenting disappearing oral traditions through still photography, audio recordings and motion pictures.

Looking at my archives, I am aware that the main subjects of my personal work have been unsung heroes of the everyday life: the elderly, the disenfranchised, the underprivileged and the laborers. Poor, often socially powerless people, whose main earthly assets, perhaps the only ones, are life experience and memories.

Unlike what I did for many years, while working for news organizations around the world, where I gathered facts in the field to then condense them, simplify them, edit them into a “news package”, to reach a specific audience, I can now afford a more organic and personal approach to my photography.

Although I am still often required to work on assignments and meet deadlines, I dedicate more time to get to know my subjects and explore different ways to tell the story.

In my work, to quote Cartier-Bresson, I strive not to be ever separated from the real world and from humanity, trying to create images that might inspire or simply focus for a moment the viewer’s ever-shortening attention span to the complexity, the poetry and the mystery of human condition.

Links:

Website: http://www.wonderfulmachine.com/photographers/giovanni-savino/
About Me: http://about.me/magneticpic
Magnetic Pic: http://magneticpic.posterous.com/