When Benoit Mandelbrot, father of the fractals' geometry, described his experience of researcher, he used to define it as: "nomads by choice, pioneers out of need"; thus, when I think of Steve McCurry, I tend to apply the same aphorism to his life of tireless researcher of the human nature. The fractals of Mandelbrot represent the reality hidden behind that principle of Euclidean order we have always associated to nature. The subjects of
McCurry's photographs represent the reality hidden behind that glossy communication which pretends to represent the humanity. And so, as Mandelbrot has provided the first mathematical tools to deal with the chaos, all the same McCurry provides us with visual accounts to deal with the diversity. Steve has all the characteristics of the true researcher:
from the patience necessary to carry out an experiment (or to take a photograph), to the
restlessness that always pushes him toward a new frontier to cross.
His life looks like a long journey in which his New York residence in 5th Avenue is a baggage room more than a refuge to restore himself, since, without any hint of rhetoric: his home is everywhere While our idea of home more and more resembles arrogant declarations of power well established on the land we occupy, to pictures of individual happiness that do not envisage any collective effects, the houses in his photos are
precarious, like the lives of those people who those houses inhabit similar to weak cellular
structures. And it is exactly that suggestion that I have tried to represent within the large
spaces of the Macro, a layout similar to a nomads' village, structures that merge to restore that sense of solidarity that you can breathe in McCurry's photos.With an exhibition project that does not consider space-temporal variables but works on the assonance of subjects,
unexpected degrees of kinship that restore the sense of humanity.
There is life and death in McCurry's photos, and that short or long itinerary that links them;
like the way and the sense itself of this exhibition that will lead the visitors to be nomads by choice, pioneers out of need.
Fabio Novembre
