Salvo Galano tells us more about how he fell in love with the magic of photography, who influenced his work and talks about past and upcoming exhibitions.
After graduating in advertising Salvo Galano received his Master’s degree in photography in Milan, after which he moved to London to work. From 1995 to 2001 Galano lived in New York working as a correspondent reporter for various Italian and international magazines. During that time his passion for portraits inspired him to travel throughout the United States, Latin America and among the tribes of the Amazon Rainforest, Chiapas and South-East Asia.
In 1998 the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation of New York awarded Galano with a Fellowship in Photography. This enabled him to shoot, produce and publish the book Sidewalk Stories. Salvo Galano’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Italy, USA, Netherlands, Serbia, Spain and France. He has also realised two underwater exhibitions: “Passaggio a sudest”, an underwater journey through southeast Asia, on the island of Ponza and "Stars”, celebrating integration on the island of Lampedusa, the iconic site of Europe’s migrant flow.
You began to study photography when you were just fourteen, what first attracted you to photography?
My first encounter with photography was when I was six, when my father gave me a camera and I was immediately fascinated by it. At fourteen, at school, among the different subjects, there was also a photography laboratory, there for the first time I entered a dark room where black and white photographs were developed, and when I saw the image appear, as if by magic, on a white sheet of baryta paper immersed in the development basin, it was love at first sight!
Who has influenced you and your work?
The photographers who, more than others, have managed to highlight the human value of each subject they portrayed, going beyond any social stigma; they have had a great influence on my work. Just to name a few: I owe so much to the photographers of the Farm Security Administration, from Dorothea Lange to Walker Evans who were able to tell the American Great Depression with humanity; to the straight photography of Paul Strand or to the meticulous social cross-section of August Sander in Germany in the early twentieth century, which, as Walter Benjamin wrote in Short History of Photography: "Sander's complete work is an atlas to practise more than a collection of photographs". In addition, the innovative point of view of Irving Penn and the empathetic reportages of Robert Frank or Diane Arbus also had a lot of influence on me.
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You have travelled extensively in your career. Do you have a favourite place to visit, either professionally or personally?
I have travelled a lot and have therefore seen many places. It is difficult to choose one, but the ones I preferred are those that somehow left the mark of extraordinary humanity on me, such as the countries of Southeast Asia, where it felt natural to return several times, just as I always return to the island of Ponza in Italy, a land to which I feel a strong bond due to the natural beauty of the place and to my roots. Here too my work has found inspiration, giving life to one of my books, L’Isola (The Island), a gallery of images that represents the history of this wonderful place and its inhabitants between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries.
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In your portrait photographs, you clearly achieve a great rapport with the sitters. What is the secret to taking a good portrait photo?
I don't think there is a real secret to creating a good portrait, every photographer has his or her own approach. Personally, I try to have an empathetic dialogue with the subject I intend to photograph and I try to highlight the characteristics that attracted my attention. When, through a glance or a detail of a subject, it is possible to show something deeper, it has succeeded in the intent.
Is there anyone famous you haven't photographed you would like to get in front of your camera?
I have no particular preferences, I think that a photographer, a painter or an artist of the visual arts in general, should, as the main objective, highlight themes or subjects that are important to them and try to share them with as many people as possible. For me, every portrait is research, the meeting between different spirits: a homeless person from New York, a migrant in search of a better future or a famous person always tell something to my lens that I can learn from, so more than a famous person I like to photograph interesting people, who have a story to tell and at the same time can add something useful to my life path.
What was the inspiration for your recent underwater exhibitions on the islands of Lampedusa and Ponza?
The crystalline sea of my island has undoubtedly inspired my underwater exhibitions. On a night of flat calm I stared at it spellbound and, peering at its seabed from the shore, I imagined the possibility of creating an exhibition in a completely unusual dimension for photos, below sea level! With these exhibitions, I wanted to allow its users to observe the photographs without limits of mental barriers, in silence, through a primordial element such as seawater. Thus a cultural event also became a playful-recreational moment, and the themes that were particularly close to my heart “shone” told through what I love most: the portrait. In fact, since the beginning of my photography studies I have concentrated almost exclusively on the portrait because I have always been fascinated by people and their looks, the eyes are truly the window that shows our soul to the outside.
Are you working on any exhibitions or publications at the moment?
At the beginning of 2020 I had an exhibition on the issue of workers' rights planned for May in Rome. Almost everything was ready, then the pandemic in Italy placed many restrictions including the closure of the exhibition spaces, therefore all the scheduled events, including mine, were postponed to a later date. Now that things are settling towards a new normal, I hope that the project can materialise by the end of this year. In addition to the exhibition, I have the idea of packaging a new book that recounts the frequent trips I have been making in Southeast Asia for several years. Lately, however, the publishing world has undergone enormous and sudden upheavals, such as making many publishing houses go bankrupt or close, including the one that had published two of my books. Aware of this situation, I am not abandoning the project to publish the book that tells the extraordinary humanity of the people I was lucky enough to meet in those places. I hope this project will be of interest to some publishing house.
Finally, if you could invite six people from history to dinner, who would they be and why?
To such a bizarre question I will try to give an equally bizarre answer. If I had to resurrect six historical figures for a dinner, I would look for visionaries who have been able to create evolutionary processes in their respective sectors, one for each category that is important to me. I would tell them what happened after their death and ask them for advice for the future. Among the artists I would certainly invite that great genius of Leonardo Da Vinci, among the photographers August Sander, among the innovators Steve Jobs, among the sportsmen Muhammed Alì, among the directors Stanley Kubrick and, finally, among the composers, I would invite Ludwig Van Beethoven and then I would ask if, in the few hours available for dinner, he could finish transcribing his tenth and unfinished symphony. I'm sure it would be a dream dinner!
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