Fabio Ponzio - East of Nowhere

While it had sometimes been possible to maintain a degree of dignity in rural areas, in the towns and cities, the atmosphere was different. Here, the sudden end of communism had left people exposed to all their fragility; unlike the rural populations, they did not have what they needed to survive. In Boris Yeltsin’s Moscow, pensioners were tatters in the wind, with nothing to depend on. The railway stations of Kyiv or Kharkiv in the Ukraine were full of homeless people seeking shelter. In Hunedoara, Romania, the inhabitants were dying, poisoned by the gigantic steel works where they had laboured for a tiny salary. There is no doubt that in the countryside, I rarely saw the kinds of hopeless poverty I encountered in the cities. But perhaps this was the reason why, in the cities, I felt the expectation of a different future and the anxiety for something still to come, though no one knew exactly what form it would take. In this context, one of the most obvious things that differentiated the East from the West was the almost total absence of commercialisation in daily life. This condition allowed the essence of things to emerge. Symbols, through their function of revealing an underlying reality, were more obviously recognisable; paradoxically, a system founded on lies allowed for clearer vision. And this is also why the people of the East struck me as so strong and unique. Their endurance of the difficulties of daily life,toil and injustice, expressed a kind of strength and courage that we in the West have long forgotten, lost as we are in the constant search for security and comfort, overwhelmed by the infinite ‘necessities’ instilled in us by consumer society. In the end, discovering the East was my discovery of the world. Its people taught me to still myself and observe. They taught me to look up and see the sky. What I retain from all those years spent in the East are a few photographs in which I sought to capture the souls of the men and women; in which I had the presumption to attempt to turn them into symbols of a deeper reality. I would love to have been successful in this and to have given back to them, in small part, what they gave to me. https://www.fabioponzio.com/ Text and photo: Fabio Ponzio Audio: Ken Hunter (AI) + info: www.audiotecafotografica.com