Three months of war today. Every day, for days and days, images of agony, of physical and emotional suffering, images of rubble. Signs of a hunger that becomes visible, of a fear that can be read in the eyes. And the bodies: of the soldiers at the front, of the wounded. The bodies of the displaced. The bodies of the dead. The children, the old. The animals. Objects. A gutted piano, a teapot in the trenches. Everything gets confused, risks overlapping, repeating itself, resulting in a sort of unstoppable loop. Can we still grasp, feel? Or has the war infiltrated our lives as spectators to the point that we hardly notice it anymore? To the point of thinking of it – or forgetting it – as an endemic fact, as a normality.
But this sequence of photographs tells that somehow war becomes normal even where it is fought; that the effort of those who live close to the conflict is precisely to live “as if”, as if there were no war, as if defending the space of everyday life even in the absurd and prolonged anguish could resemble a truce . The reduced curfew and the reopening of some businesses; the underground in motion – the embrace of two young people who are waiting for her. It almost feels like life was. But maybe it’s an illusion.
The column The photo of the day, edited by Paolo Di Paolo, daily since last March 15, becomes weekly. It will be available every Friday on the Repubblica website.
Here the archive