Dietro le quinte. L’eredità del mondo mezzadrile e le tracce della modernità nella documentazione fotografica di Mauro Guerrini

Abstract

An intersection of paths – urban, literally – but also cultural or ideal and political- leads to the publication of part of a photographic reportage that covers the transition from the sharecropping society to the contemporary world, a phase that in the Sienese province almost touched the end of the last century. The photographer – Mauro Guerrini – enjoyed a personal and particular intimacy with families, places, practices, contexts in which the extreme edge of a secular culture hybridized with the modern. Sharecropping system social world was marked by hierarchy, by the subordination of individual with respect to the family, of the woman with respect to the man, of the worker with respect to the landownership, a back-stage with respect to the frontstage of bourgeois, urban and progressed world and for these reasons its own actors hastened to abandon it, guarding however a resisting cultural legacy. The photographer witnessed the change, an experience in which both conditions were legible: this is the core of the published reportage, here partially offered, and of the anthropological reading of those images. Through and beyond their esthetic values, they have had the power of triggering free intuitions, to solicit memories and to drive analysis relative both to the sharecropping world that disappears, and to the present time: the implicit comparison they inspired, underlines some actual trends, such as the ongoing heritagization of the past, the gentrification of its real estate and landscape inheritance, the current resemantization of the humanity/world relationship but, regrettably, also the removal of what was something positive such as thriftiness ethics, sustainability, the value of working skills.