A blind photographer, the story of Alessandro Bersani

The darkroom is daily bread for the artist who develops negatives and prints images. For Alessandro Bersani it is something more: his whole life takes place in the dark. This 62-year-old professional photographer, born and living in Piacenza, is blind.

A THOUSAND ACTIVITIES – Yet he worked for The Friday of the Republic and other magazines, for Videotime which produces Mediaset TV programmes, for the Guggenheim museum in New York and Cambridge University. He has published architecture books, about fifteen monographs and about ten catalogs of the Old Time Show, a vintage car and motorbike show. He followed 11 editions of the Mille Miglia. He portrayed 160 characters, including former ministers Pier Luigi Bersani (“homonymous but not related”) and Paola De Micheli, in a volume whose proceeds were donated to Unicef. He immortalizes the works of Giulio Manfredi, the master goldsmith who takes inspiration for his jewels from Raphael and Piero della Francesca (“from Piacenza like me, but lives in Milan in the house where Giacomo Puccini lived”). You are a specialist in authentic antiques and reproductions of works of art, the same ones published every day on the comments page of Italy Today. He even collaborated with the prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro, but this is another chapter, which concerns his computer skills, as he says in the book I see, printed in 18 point, that is, typefaces 80 percent larger than the ones you are reading. On the cover, he has his left eye wide open.

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THE DARKNESS IN HIS LIFE – Darkness entered the life of Bersani, an only child, from birth, without his parents realizing his terrible handicap. «For a no less terrible reason: my mother Anna Maria suffered from severe schizophrenia, but her psychiatrists diagnosed it when I was already 44 years old. She manipulated me. It doesn’t seem like a joke to you: as a child I blindly trusted my parents, both of whom are now deceased. I couldn’t have known that they were suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. To save myself I had to cut ties with them.”

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Are you referring to the stress of having a blind child? «For my father Orlando, a sales representative, also that of having a psychotic wife. I suffered from depression until I was 20. In 1991 he decided to take his own life. My mother said she heard voices. She went to the police to report that she was the victim of conspiracies. Strong of character, she managed to outwit them with her inventions. Once I was summoned to the barracks because he said I had been kidnapped.”

How do you picture it in your mind? «Small, proportionate body, very beautiful. Which made her madness pass off as strange.”

Was she also violent? «I remember that when I was 5 years old he took me to Upim. I burst into tears because he dragged me away from the toy department without buying me anything. When we returned home, she beat me up, shouting: “You made me look bad!”. She played them so loudly that I fell asleep exhausted.”

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All this marked his character. «It turned me into a social outcast. To keep me tied to him, he kept telling me that I shouldn’t talk to little girls, later to girls, as they were “naughty and gossipy”. He kept me segregated at home. He distorted my relationship with the world. That is a phase of my life that I never recovered, I still miss it. After adolescence I had to work on myself to reshape the concept of reality.”

Were you able to start a family? «Blindness has always prevented me from grasping the alchemy of glances, fundamental for the first approach to a woman. In 1985 I married Elena, an elementary school teacher who had been introduced to me by some friends. But after 34 years we separated, although we still loved each other very much.”

Studied? “I am an accountant. At 16, IBM came to school to present us with a course for computer programmers. I was excited to sign up. “There’s no talking about it,” my parents froze. Only at the age of 22 was I able to attend the 600 hours of lessons of the Emilia-Romagna Region and I became a computer scientist.”

And he ended up working with Di Pietro in Milan. «I left him on the eve of the Clean Hands investigation. One morning on bus 60 I felt a change in temperature at the height of my thigh. Just enough time to put my hand in my pocket: they had taken my wallet with 400 thousand lire inside. I went up to the fourth floor of the Palace of Justice and immediately asked the prosecutor if something couldn’t be done. Di Pietro burst out laughing: “Alessa’, how come you don’t come to work by car?”. Me: doctor, I’m blind, I’ve never had a driving license. Him: “And why didn’t you buy it?”. I responded to the joke with another joke: if I had done that, we would have met much sooner.”

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What’s wrong with his eyes? «During pregnancy my mother contracted toxoplasmosis from the house cat, Ciccia. She had no consequences, but it seriously damaged my retinal macules. At the age of 35 she developed glaucoma, a pathology that increases intraocular pressure. The retina is, so to speak, broken through. Result: total blindness.”

Didn’t her parents notice that she couldn’t see? «No, although I cried in despair as soon as they took me out of the house in a wheelchair. The sunlight hurt my pupils. I was already 2 years old when a doctor understood. He prescribed me some dark glasses. But my parents refused to accept that I was visually impaired. They thought something was wrong with their head. How many electroencephalograms!

When did you realize your vision was damaged? «In elementary school. Even though I was sitting in the first pew, I couldn’t see the words written on the blackboard. But this position gave me an advantage: I was ready to reach the teacher’s desk at the end of the lessons. So I could collect the sugar soaked in coffee that remained at the bottom of the cup that the teacher Laura Ghinelli had delivered from the bar.”

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Not very hygienic for the poor pupil. “At the time I could still notice if the teacher had licked the spoon. She didn’t do it.”

What do you see when you wake up in the morning? «Two large black spots that occupy almost the entire field of vision. They are the so-called scotomas. After a tenth of a second they disappear and the brain begins to process what surrounds me.”

What do you mean? «Permanent blackness is a very rare condition in a blind person: it only occurs when the optic nerve is cut. In other cases there is what doctors define as “light-shadow perception”. My senses help to reconstruct a mental image so that I can interact with the environment.”

Can you clarify further? «The brain receives a flood of information from hearing, changes in temperature of the epidermis, touch of both hands and feet, smell. The brain compares them and merges them with what little the optic nerve still perceives. There is an endless compensation, all mental, a sort of simulation. It’s what allowed me to become a photographer. Unfortunately the retina does not provide me with any information on colours.”

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What was the medical diagnosis? «Macular atrophy with total blindness. I only have a few peripheral receptors left in my retina.”

Can’t anything be done? “No. Retinal tissue is like brain tissue, it does not regenerate. I could try to transplant the receptors, but the remaining ones that are still functioning would be taken away. I don’t feel like risking it.”

Could the situation get worse? “Yes. I have to protect the microcirculation that keeps some receptors alive. So they make me take a sildenafil tablet every week, better known as Viagra, ridiculous, right?

Do you take other precautions? «Until I was 23 I couldn’t stay outside the house with my eyes open. Today, against sunlight I use very dark high-altitude lenses, the same ones used by mountaineers who climb Everest.”

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How did you become a photographer? «When I was 7, my father bought himself a new camera and gave me his Kodak Instamatic, a kind of miniature washing machine, with fixed shutter speed, focus and aperture. Magazine of 12 poses: I used them all in one day. It was also the only one where I took photos, because my parents, who were very stingy, refused to buy me any more films.”

Let’s say they didn’t give her a good start. «In 1986 I bought a Korean camera with my savings, the following year a Minolta, but the results, in terms of sharpness, were disappointing. The turning point came with the autofocus of the first Canon. Today I use a Nikon and a Fuji.”

It escapes me how a blind person takes photographs. «I have coined a definition: intuitive photography. Franco Lefevre, editor in chief and art director of Republic Friday who bought me some photo shoots on film, in 1990 he told me: “In my opinion you are suitable for studio work. I’m sending you to a friend of mine in Milan.” It was Fabrizio Ferri, an extraordinary fashion photographer, who immortalized in New York for Vogue the most fascinating models in the world, ex-husband of Alessandra Ferri, former prima ballerina at the American ballet theater of the Metropolitan and at La Scala”.

And cousin of the journalist Giuliano Ferrara. «Ferri opened a world to me. Until 2000 I had a 700 square meter studio in Milan which contained the largest egg-shaped limbo in the city.”

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Never heard of it. What is that? «A rounded masonry backdrop. Joins wall and floor. It totally abstracts the photographed subject, making it appear suspended in space.”

But is his life black and white or gray? “Good question. It changes little. I don’t know what red is: I’ve never seen it. Ditto the other colors. My favorite is what I think is black. It doesn’t reflect light, it makes me invisible.”

Why did you leave Milan? «I couldn’t stand it anymore. It is a city that considers cunning a gift. For me it’s not like that.”

What do you miss most right now? “Money. It’s always been the last thing on my mind, so I don’t have any. I am a blind man who has not resigned himself to a life as an invalid. Today I have a pension, 1,200 euros a month. But it’s not enough to live on and pay for a companion.”

Have you ever complained to God about your fate? «At 18 I asked him: why me?».

And what answer did he give her? «“Why yes, because it is so”. There is nothing personal. For Buddha, the blind person is privileged. He sees with his heart rather than with his eyes.”

Also for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: «The essential is invisible to the eye». The little Prince. «Fausto Taiten Guareschi, founder and abbot emeritus of Fudenji, a Buddhist monastery in Bargone, in the Parma area, told me. He is a relative of Giovannino Guareschi, the author of Don Camillo and Peppone. He explained to me that, without knowing it, I had embraced the Zen philosophy. I think he was right.”

Stefano Lorenzetto