LIMINARY IMAGES. THE RITES OF PASSAGE IN THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUMS OF THE SICILIAN FAMILIES OF THE XX SEC.

Abstract

“Life is not what you have lived, but what you remember and how you remember it to tell“. Taking cue from the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the essay analyzes a gallery of photographic images portraying «family photos», made in Sicily between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, which are placed in an intermediate space between oral and written traditions becoming «biographical object». The analysis of the photographic corpus searches for the connections between the different events that the image has gone through (production, transmission, fruition). It is in his «life story», in his passage from one generation to the other, from one type of representation of relationships to another, that these photographs reveal in full their being a particular type of «biographical object» capable of soliciting narratives through the memory of its possessors. Photography is grafted inside the already elaborated and experimented scheme of the human life cycle (from cradle to coffin), marked by its «rites of passage»in strict observance of the centrality of the family with regard to the social context.