Giovanni Maria Sacco: “Silent Theaters” / Rob Hammer: “Roadside Meditations”

Silence and forgetting By Frank Dietschreit Deutschlandfunk Kultur, reading, October 14, 2023

The passage of time, the dissolution of structures and certainties, the search for home and identity, the destruction of buildings and nature landscapes, growth and decay – these are connecting lines between two Photo books, intellectually overlapping and yet artistically different as could hardly be. The Italian Giovanni Maria Sacco travels through the country battered by globalization, evidence of industrialism decline can be found everywhere. The American Rob Hammer drives through the endless expanses of his Landes and reflects on the beauty, which is both profane and threatened.

In contrast to Rob Hammer, who works alongside his long-term documentary projects made a name for himself as an advertising photographer and enjoys an international reputation, Giovanni Maria Sacco is still relatively unknown in this country, a blank page. It's high time to discover him and his unmistakable handwriting and stylish technique. Sacco came late and as self-taught to professional photography. He was a university professor of computer science for 30 years before he gave up his job to pursue with mathematical elegance and accuracy his look at a world which is threatened with extinction. His photos take us into dusty and crumbling rooms and ruins in which decay did all the work.

Work, sweat and tears

The photos are metaphors for death and transience. Although not a single person can be seen in the pictures,his photos tell stories of work, sweat and tears, as if you could still hear the laughters and the cries of the people who spent a large part of their lives there. The pictures are kept always in a melancholic black and white, mysterious shadows can be seen everywhere and the last rays of sunlight making their way through an industrial rubble landscape search and bathe the hidden and forgotten. The empty, dilapidated buildings are reminiscent of theater halls and theater houses in which people still played, loved, hated, dreamed. A shoe lying carelessly around, one shattered bottle, a weathered door, broken turbines, crooked shelves in which nothing is stacked and stored anymore, chimneys rising into the gray sky from which no more steam escapes. Everywhere there are hidden stories and the silence in the the rooms are reminiscent of the silence of theaters before the audience enters the hall, or the silence after the last performance. Fluttering in the musty air, a plastic tarpaulin is like a theater curtain that you just have to pull to the side to see the stage ready for a play about life and death. In a disused textile factory, Sacco discovered a sacred-looking room: a picture of Mother Mary with her blissfully smiling baby Jesus is stuck on the sooty wall, there are old work boots, plastic bags and leftover clothes on the dirty floor. In one abandoned cement factory, Sacco glances into a huge hall that looks like a church nave, with its gothic columns and arches. Falling through the broken ceiling rays of sunshine illuminate the corridors and old tracks covered in the dust of time where trucks were once moved with cement. One thinks to be stll able to listen to the echo of the machines. The production hall of a pharmaceutical laboratory is reminiscent of steel beams and glass facades on the architecture and art temple of the New National Gallery. In general, many of these abandoned factories reflect the stoic dignity of silence rot, elements of Bauhaus architecture: it often seems as if Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, as mere godfather, must just watch sadly how their strict, architecture reduced to form and function is relegated to the hell of history, the theater of the industrial age has fallen silent and forgotten.

The road trip as a real imagination

Falling silent and forgetting, traveling and reflecting: that is also Rob's theme Hammer’s “Roadside Meditations.” The journeys and reflections begin and end with a photo or a look through the window of his car in the outside mirror: he looks forward and backward at the same time, sees the past and the future, the landscape that already lies behind him and the landscape that still awaits him. His road trip across the USA is a real imagination, a journey that never begins and never ends, the photo series an odyssey through a country you can't grasp nor understand. In his photos you can feel the heat of midday as well as the cold of the evening. The sun is shining from the sky, banks of fog are wafting across the meadows, winds are sweeping across the dust-dry land, dark clouds fly by, snow-capped mountains tower above Horizon opens up, streets are like asphalt treadmills drawn with a ruler parched widhts from which all life has fled. He sees and shows – in matt, colorful images – endless overhead power lines, rusty fences, information signs, advertising posters, streets that end nowhere, motels where no one stays anymore, parking lots where there are no cars, landscapes where no animals graze, rivers where nobody fishes, mountains that nobody climbs anymore: mad standstill.

Absolute emptiness, complete silence

There is no life anywhere, no animal and not a single person to be seen, at one point you believe you see a woman behind the window of an abandoned shop, but it's only one mannequin forgotten when moving out. Absolute emptiness, complete silence, it seems as if time had frozen, as if humans had died out, as if the world consisted only of meaningless symbols that point to meaningless things. Rob Hammer , just like Giovanni Maria Sacco, sees “Silent Theaters”: The Drama of Life shines over, the world is a ruin of missed opportunities, lost dreams and vain wishes. Nature doesn't need us, it can do just fine without roads and signs, parking lots and motels, overland lines and fences: this is what the “Roadside Meditations” talks about in frightening, beautiful, breathtaking images.