The photos of Giorgio Lambri and Stefano Pancini documenting the selfies in the places where two tragedies have just occurred
by Gian Luca Rocco*
Piacenza, Thursday 11 April 2024, via Colombo roundabout. A car, due to the driver’s illness, hits a bicycle and ends up inside the window of the Bulla shop. While the emergency services rush around the injured cyclist, a man holds his cell phone and takes a nice selfie with a dying person in the background. The moment is immortalized by a journalist, his Piacenza colleague Stefano Pancini, who captures this surreal moment.
Piacenza, 26 May 2018, railway station. A woman ends up under a train, her leg shattered. While five people work to save her life and what remains of her limb, a boy holds his cell phone and, miming the victory sign, immortalizes himself with a dying person in the background. The moment is set by our Giorgio Lambri and the photo will go around the world, ending up in all the big newspapers, from CNN to the BBC. Two images that Piacenza doesn’t deserve.
BAD DEHUMANIZING EPISODES
Two bad episodes that do not do justice to a city that, for example, makes volunteering and helping others one of its best qualities. Two photos which, unfortunately, forget the work of the people who in the same photos are trying to save the lives of two human beings. Two shots that leave time for other considerations that go beyond Piacenza. Because almost six years have passed between the two feats, but in reality not even a minute has passed. No evolution: phone in hand, the culture of the selfie at any cost wins over logic, rationality, but also over the minimum common sense that should lead a person to imagine that “it is not the case” to take that photo. Aside from the curiosity of knowing who they will have shared that shot with, which human being upon receiving it will be able to say “cool”, “mythical”, “hero” and not “are you an idiot?”, the fact remains that we live immersed in a dehumanizing culture. It is clear that these subjects do not feel the slightest discomfort: filtered through the lens there is no longer reality, there is no woman suffering, but only an effective scene to share with their contacts.
“WHAT IS GOING ON IN HIS BRAIN?”
It’s difficult to say what goes on in the brains of these subjects, it’s too easy to distance oneself from them. Maybe think that in short, if we followed the crumbs of wood, we could find the pile of sawdust that is evidently coming out of their heads. Scandalize us, convince ourselves that these are things that only concern others, people who feel like protagonists of Cronenberg’s film “Crash” in which a group of fetishists cause and witness road accidents to increase their sexual arousal. Perhaps it is better to do a collective examination of conscience, so as not to waste the excellent work of two colleagues capable of immortalizing the right moment in indignation as an end in itself. Remember when the dish arrives at a restaurant and before you even savor its aroma or flavour, you already have multiple photos of your daughter’s first communion. Remembering our daughter’s first communion, when instead of holding her hand, we spent the time taking photographs that we will never look at. And the eclipse that we didn’t see except behind the phone screen, as well as those wonderful sunsets that we appreciated only with our backs turned to “enter” the scene. Or all the other infinite times in which we filtered life from that screen just to say “we were there”: that time at the seaside or that time in the mountains, at the football match, at the volleyball match, at the exhibition, at the Louvre where Mona Lisa, if he had a penny for every selfie that hosts it, he could buy Apple ten times over.
“TECHNOLOGY HAS DELUSED US”
Technology, the mobile phone, allows us to preserve memories but it has deluded us that if we do not preserve that memory or rather, are not part of it, the reality we are experiencing, generally a memorable moment if it deserves a photo, does not exist. However, the opposite is true: the moment in which we shoot is the moment in which we have lost the present to entrust it to a past made of pixels. Ultimately, a big question remains: why two episodes precisely in Piacenza? Let’s hope the answer is: we have better journalists than elsewhere.
*Gian Luca Rocco – editorial director Gruppo Libertà
