The last year I have accepted to hold a “lesson” about the photography in an elementary school.
I have carried with my the first popular Camera product in U.S.A., a “N° 0 BROWNIE”, one Hasselblad 500C/M of 1960, and the latest and powerfulcamera of the World, a Hasselblad 4HD50 Multi-Shoot.
The classroom of sciences accommodated approximately seventy children, I was on the desk of the teacher’s sourronded of my three polished cameras and all the teacher’s at the bottom of the room, shooulder’s at wall.
I have begun saying that, before speaking about the photography, we need to find an agreement about what is an image, and therefore I pull out from my pocket one postcard and waving it in front of the children I asked: “ Is a image this?”
The answer was a chorus of “YES”, only few children had answered “NO” and so, to one of these children, I have quickly say: “Ok, but if this isn’t a image, what can be?
And the children reply me, simply: “ It’s a postcard”
Everybody laughed.
“Right” - I reply - “It’s a postcard. Only a Postcard.”-“ And now we make a small experiment: everybody of you must think to the face of your mother, until you can see, really, in front of you. Are you ready? You see it?”- “YES”, was the chorus”, and in that moment I have torn the postcard in thousand pieces, I have flung up them and, immediately, say at the children :”Well, now you must try to do at the face of your mother the same thing that I have do at the postcard”
Silence.
“Everybody can do it? Nobody? I know it .It is impossible. The face of your mother isn’t a postcard, is a image. One image is a mental object wide like your memory, height like your desire and depth like your feeling .Your images belong only to you and nobody else can see they. Your images will follow you all the life, but are not subject to your will; you can nor modify neither cancel them. Them are indestructible. Only the time will be able to do somethings them, but only in the same way in which will to something to your’s.
The photography is only the scissor with which we can tried to recut from our life everythings can transmit our feeling of the world.”
The teachers seemed me a little pales, but maybe was only a light effect. In the next hour the children asked my everythings, but nobody has questioned my about the three polished cameras. It has been a good sign, I think.