At one point the focus shifted inward. It happened with the covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns which, since March 2020, have accelerated the centripetal motion of interpersonal relationships, limiting them to a domestic dimension.
Photography was also affected. Not that before there was no lack of artists focused on describing their family relationships, but now the sensitivity towards these issues has grown. What weight do the “lives of others” and the relationships that compose them acquire, when the world shrinks within the four walls of the house? How do these dynamics change? Between the limits of voyeurism and exhibition, the need for confrontation arose for the spectators. For the authors, however, that of telling.
So it was for the British photographer Guy Bolongaro and his book Gravity begins at home, published by the London-based Here Press at the end of 2021. For Bolongaro, photography was almost saving. In fact, until 2014 he was a social worker and in his spare time he tried to shoot short documentaries: a complicated combination, which over time led to a nervous breakdown. To get out of it, he shifted his attention to what kept him anchored to the ground: his family, made up of his wife and two children, starting to photograph them daily. And during the first lockdown this all intensified.
Gravity begins at home is the result of this path and is made up of four separate leporelli (books created from a single strip of paper folded on itself like an accordion), each with variable openings horizontally and vertically, all grouped together (just like a family ) inside a box finished with stickers applied by Bolongaro himself and his children. It is a book with a fluid, disordered structure. And the nature of the images that make up the work is also disordered: limbs and faces of children in mid-air immortalized by the sharp light of the flash, cats with an intolerant gaze, household objects that float like spaceships and blend with the bodies present in the scene.
For those with a family with small children these are scenes of ordinary chaos. What is extraordinary, however, is the way he sees them and tells them: a light way, in which the members of the family float freely in space, defying the rules of gravity. Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space, sang Spiritualized. Although the true reference song of this book, from which it also takes its title, is Gravity begins at home by the Scottish musician Ivor Cutler, who argues in the text that the theory of gravity contains only “a lot of nonsense”. Bolongaro’s photographs seem to confirm this: when it comes to family, everything is in the air.
(Veronica Daltri)