A work in progress: photographing pain.
It is reasonable to say that a photographer’s style and choice of subjects also depends on the emotional stimuli he or she was subjected to while growing up.
This concept made me look at my visual work from yet another, intimate, self-analytical angle.
© Giovanni Savino
While I certainly love to portray beauty in my photos, whenever I am able to find it and see it, I think it would be honest for me to say that the majority of my subjects depict and portray an array of painful, difficult, controversial, uncomfortable emotions and situations.
I realize that human pain, whether blatantly shouted or quietly whispered, is, and has always been, the strongest conceptual magnet attracting my camera lens.
Existential and psychological pain was always present in my life, since my earliest childhood. I was able to address and resolve some issues while growing up, others are still unresolved to this day, in the sunset of my life.
© Giovanni Savino
So I decided to embark in attempting to visually explore the pain and existential suffering I perceive and detect, at many different levels, in the majority people around me.
My ongoing photographic project has three main objectives:
- To focus as closely as possible onto the most diverse, often less obvious or less externalized expressions of suffering of the human spirit, mind and body; to humbly acknowledge such pain and to compassionately document it.
- To present the many faces of human suffering as an honest social study, to re-assert through my photographs the widespread existence of pain in a profit and technology driven society, which is often, either in denial of one’s suffering, or unable to organically accept the universal, unifying power of pain.
- To work on my own existential pain, find points of reference to other people’s pain and explore different strategies to cope with it. My angle of view is broad, in an effort to understand how we can accept pain as an inevitable part of life, while remaining able to appreciate the small and big blessings of our everyday existence.
© Giovanni Savino
These are a few of the field notes I have been taking lately, as I started to build a body of work around this difficult, still under-studied, phenomenon of our lives:
- Pain is a four-letter word.
- Pain is probably the truest equalizer in our lives, regardless of our social, cultural or religious status. The rich suffers and so does the poor.
- We all experience pain, mental or physical, at some point in our lives.
- Pain is something we fear, we are not sure how to deal with, something we strive to avoid and to hide from others. Pain, in modern society has sometimes some implicit, unspoken connection, with shame.
- We try drugs, meditation, psychotherapy, prayer, anesthesia and /or anything else to deal with pain or to avoid it altogether. Pain is scary.
- The threshold or intensity of pain is not easily measurable; it is a subjective experience. When asked to describe our pain on a scale from one to ten, we all give a different answer.
- The quality of pain and its manifestation is also very subjective.
- Pain can be a piercing scream, a dull, almost silent moan and everything in between. Pain can be sudden, occasionally or last a whole lifetime.
- In modern society there is a fairly common denial of suffering. Mental suffering in particular is usually associated with instability, madness, with a stubbornly widespread mental health stigma. This leads to ostracize the sufferer as an unreliable, dangerous and a socially undesirable individual.
- A lot of pain goes undetected; a lot more goes untold and unheard.
- Pain is sometimes invisible and well camouflaged but always ends up manifesting itself and acquires visibility when and where we least expect it.
- Inflicting pain onto others is a common technique to coerce and control. From dictatorships to corporations pain is the most efficient form of manipulating peoples’ lives and beliefs.
- Pain is sometimes associated with death but it is often feared more than death itself.
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Giovanni Savino is a New York-based photographer and cinematographer specializing in editorial, documentary and portrait photography.
