Pellegrin said that photography is not actually about taking pictures-taking pictures is incidental. It’s a by-product, in a sense, of everything else. What you are doing is giving form-photographic form-to a thought, to an opinion, to an understanding of the world, of what is in front of you. And so if we think in these terms, then you have to improve the quality of your thoughts.

Pellegrin was born in Rome, into a family of architects. His father, Luigi, was an internationally renowned designer of public buildings and schools, and his mother, Luciana Menozzi, was an architect and a professor who came from a family of faded aristocrats. Pellegrin said, “There was this family imperative that you had to express yourself, either in the humanities or the arts. And there was this absolute disdain for anything that was related to office work.

Luigi treated his time with the children as an opportunity to impart his aesthetic world view. He would expose his children to art and history of art. There were pilgrimages to the Met, the Louvre. He felt that there’s a duty to transmit his interests and his knowledge to his children. “Through artistic expression, Luigi instructed his children, “you have to pay for the oxygen you breathe.”

But after three years, it just became clear to him that it wasn’t his calling. So one day, when he was twenty-two, he walked into his father’s studio and told his dad that he was terminating his architectural studies. The only certainly he had in that monologue was that at one point he realized that he could not get away with it without suggesting an alternative-photography.

Pellegrin read essays on photography by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, and noted the ways in which great authors and poets, such as Rilke, observed and refracted the world in front of them. Pellegrin worked various odd jobs, and spent much of the proceeds on photography books.

Glaucoma is one of the most common causes of blindness for people older than sixty, but it’s rare in young people, and the factor that trigger it remain poorly understood. No area of vision that is lost to glaucoma can be restored. Glaucoma did not deter Pelegrín’s desire to photograph more. Instead it filled him with a rage to see. To see more, to see beyond- to see at the maximum. If anything, he has come to see glaucoma as an ally, a kind of secret weapon. It imbued his work with a kind of finality. It gave an urgency to everything he did. And perhaps to go blind at the end of his life can be seen as the completion of his opus( 作品) . He feels, like a group of devoted calligraphers in Pamuk’s novel “My Name Is Red.”, and like them, he has given his eyes to God.

Source

Paolo Pellegrin’s Photographic Quest for the Sublime | The New Yorker

A Photographer’s Month in Ukraine - The New York Times

這次的podcast的資料來源都是從2022年五月23月Ben Taub在紐約客雜誌上取得。裡面還有更多跟Pellegrin精彩的訪談，也希望大家能去閱讀。

如果你覺得我的podcast對你的英文學習有幫助就請到Apple podcast 幫我按五顆星訂閱和分享。也可到李老師陪你探索英文世界的臉書和IG粉絲專頁按贊追縱或留言。那我們就下集見了。 Talk to you next time on Exploring English with Ms Lee. Goodbye

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