Dino Pedriali was young and beautiful when Pier Paolo Pasolini entrusted him with the task of documenting with his photos the making of Petrolio, perhaps the most complex and tormented work of the great intellectual, the novel that he could not finish and that remained a little ‘like his will. Just as “testament of the body” were defined those black and white images, more than a hundred, that the photographer, who died today in Rome at the age of 71, he snapped then – it was the autumn of 1975 – almost taken by the hand of the writer and director, sharing with him every moment of his last days, in the house of Sabaudia as in the refuge of Chia, with an effort of documentation that seems to investigate even his thoughts , the extreme sadness of those remnants of life. They had met, Pedriali will later tell, by frequenting the same undergrowth of the Roman beaches and suburbs, the same children of life. And it is precisely from the nudes, from the images of the kids, the addicts, the drifters that Pedriali’s art comes to life in those years to which the portraits of artists and intellectuals will be added, a story through images of the twentieth-century culture that starts from Man Ray, his early teacher, and passing through Pasolini he arrives at Fellini, Moravia, Federico Zeri, Giacomo Manzù, De Chirico, Nurejev. Portraits as deep and poignant as the ‘Caravaggesque’ nudes of which he was a master. “Just as Caravaggio took his models from the street and ennobled them in his paintings, so too Pedriali undresses his proletarian models showing their strength, pride, mute self-awareness”, wrote Pieter Weiermair in the introduction to the volume that he retraces his career (Nudes and portraits – Photographs 1974-2003). An important path in which Pasolini had remained a fixed point, almost a love, as he will confess when interviewed by Franca Leosini in a memorable episode of Storie Maledette. “I have a debt to Pasolini, an eternal debt”, underlined on that occasion, already tired, his hoarse voice perhaps already due to the tumor in the throat that in the end killed him. Because that incredible sequence of black and white photos – almost a film – that the writer did not have time to see, has become history, they are the images of him that we all have in our heads, they tell the man and the artist as little other, even in the exhibition of the naked body that Pedriali’s lens seems to almost caress, free from any vulgarity in spite of that atmosphere of violated intimacy that the photos taken from the garden window seem to suggest. “Pasolini had been abandoned by everyone, the loneliness I saw in him is terrible”, he recounted, reconstructing those moments, “photographs are my language, but it is difficult when you have a poet in front of you, I fell in love with Pasolini, I would say immediately. And I was pierced by pain, because it came suddenly. ” The last shot is from November 1, 1975, Pasolini was killed on the night of the second. For Pedriali a trauma, but also a feeling so strong that even today, many years later, it made him move. After all, life was not easy even with him, despite the professional successes, the many exhibitions hosted by the most important museums and galleries, from Palazzo Reale in Genoa to Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, from the Salone delle Feste in Paris to the Kunsthalle of Basel. The last exhibition a year ago, in June 2020, organized in Rome by the Alda Fendi foundation with his photos of Pasolini. Then the disease, lived in solitude for Covid, months in hospital and then in a clinic, assisted by his son Tristano. Death, friends say, took him into total poverty. Accomplice of the illness, but also a bad depression that had removed him from the world of art: “He lived on the rights collected by Siae, the last few years guest by a friend in a very small room, his photos under the bed”, says the artist Alessandro Valeri, “it is terrible that he had to go through this ordeal alone, without recognition from the institutions”. To undermine his health, they say the bitterness was added for a lawsuit brought by a niece of Pasolini who asked back the negatives of those photos taken in 1975 to the writer. In fact, Rome, the councilor for culture Miguel Gotor announced in the afternoon, will take care of the organization and expenses for the funeral. Even the Minister of Culture pays homage to him: “his sensibilities immortalized an era”, writes Franceschini. Yet his work, friends once again underline, does not currently even exist a real archive, even this will have to be dealt with. The funeral on Saturday 13 November at 11 in the Church of the artists in Piazza del Popolo.
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Source From: Ansa
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