© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (October 27th, 1943 - Carabinieri Station)
Can you tell us where you grew up?
Daniele Molajoli (DM): I was born and raised in Rome. And like many Romans, I have a strong bond with the city; Rome defines and suffocates us. We often talk badly about it, as if all our troubles depended on it, like a sort of destiny. I thought and planned to abandon it for a long time, but I never really managed to leave for one reason or another. At some point, I understood I had to cope with it, and I started to re-evaluate many aspects.
How did you step into photography and how did it evolve?
DM: I got interested in photography when attending the philosophy faculty at the University. I was interested in aesthetic studies. I enrolled in a photography school in the Municipality of Rome, and for three years, I learned the basics and spent a lot of time in the darkroom. Once I finished school, I thought that working as a photographer would bring me more in touch with reality than philosophy. I felt images more congenial direct than words as a way to express. So I started the whole mess: working a few years as an assistant, opening the VAT number, and then a thousand jobs of all kinds that took me a bit far from the initial aspirations. Only later I took up my thoughts and feelings more seriously and search for my way in photography.
It’s hard to say how my studies in philosophy have influenced my photography. I guess it’s by helping me keep questioning the real and feeding a critical spirit. Perhaps it has led to a less instinctual and more reflective approach, in the sense that I like to investigate and read a lot on my topics. Photography is an opportunity to stimulate curiosity and explore themes that interest me. Only later, it becomes something more sensitive and open to the world.
For years, I struggled to find time to take care of personal projects and step away from a more commercial mindset. Using film for my works, I separated the two areas and started over with a different and more personal approach. In more recent times, my commissioned works also benefit from specializing in artistic and conceptual documentation. Getting in contact with other artists also provided new stimuli.
What about your approach in general? What are the reasons behind 271 Days a project about the Nazi occupation of Rome during the Second World War?
DM: I am interested in studying the landscape, which I consider a space of investigation, to see how places change with time and a language to explore themes. In the series 271 days, the landscape is related to dramatic events during WWII. Lately, I have searched for the connection of man with nature. A theme that opens up to several issues both at a personal and socio-political level. The story of Rome’s occupation and resistance during the Second World War seemed to be a perfect staging of the human soul. As for the Aristotelian idea of the unity of time and space, Rome’s “open city” was suddenly closed from Nazi occupation, during a specific time, from 8th September 1943 to 4th June 1944. Two hundred seventy-one days were the most tragic and evil facts of the city’s history, but also the acts of more extraordinary courage, altruism, and love occur. The project became a tribute to my town and a unique way to tell man’s good and evil through the landscape and history.
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (December 1st, 1943 - Fort Bravetta)
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (January 3rd, 1944 - Pension Oltre Mare)
From the point of view of historical and field research, which collaborations with other experts have you built?
DM: I was lucky enough to photograph and talk to Mario Fiorentini, one of the most important Roman partisans, one of the last still alive. When I met him, I felt like being in front of Garibaldi for me. He told me about his memories and feelings, showed me photographs of the time, and talked a lot about his wife, who was also a partisan. It was so moving. There’s a picture of their wedding in the series, which took place shortly after the liberation in the Piazza del Campidoglio. I would like it to be the work’s conclusion because it is a moment of hope and love needed to breathe at the end of this story and remind us that the partisans were martyrs who sacrificed themselves for a better future. The other encounter that marked me firmly was Alberto Sed, one of the very few Roman Jews to return from Auschwitz. A man of incredible generosity and positivity, a rare example of humanity. The meeting with him is a memory that I jealously keep. Unfortunately, he died last year. I often think back to his sweet eyes and hear his voice again as he recounted the terrible experience he had lived. He said that Dante was undoubtedly a great writer, but he didn’t know the true hell as well as he did.
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (September 10th, 1943 - Porta San Paolo)
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (August 6th, 1944 - Mario Fiorentini's home)
271 Days is also a declaration of love for the city...
DM: Several years ago, I felt that the time had come for me to describe my city through the landscape. But I needed a solid reason to start. So I turned to the historical period of Rome’s resistance, a story that I have always loved and that is still largely ignored. I went to look for the places where the facts I was reading about happened, some well-known others unfamiliar to me. It was an excellent way to find a path inside the city, from the center to the periphery, and look at Rome with different eyes. The motivation to remember an often forgotten page of the city’s history, a tragic but also beautiful page, led me to think about the courage and solidarity of its inhabitants. Through the story of those 271 days, I found a soul and an identity of Rome that I never expected.
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (June 4th, 1944 - Porta Maggiore)
It is also a work on the landscape, places that are probably known and often crossed by both citizens and tourists without a real awareness of the historical events that have occurred here. Provoking, awakening the memory is one of the strong reasons for this work, which combines beautiful photographs with timely captions. Tell us about this aspect...
DM: To give value to the history of resistance and make the photographs legible, I decided to add captions that recount the past events and reactivate the memory of the places. But I didn’t want to do a real documentation job; too much time has passed to be able to document. I decided not to use the portraits of some witnesses of the time. I approached the landscape through the understanding of the identity of the places. Thus their history and past. The investigation was research, verification of those signs in the landscape that refers to what happened. The sites photographed can therefore be read as a simple vision of the contemporary city. Still, though some details in the photo and the captions’ reading, a visual short circuit reactivates the place’s memory. Finding today some black vans where a roundup took place, a burnt tree where a young partisan was executed, imagining that a passer-by portrayed in a photo is in the same position as a character of the time creates a small epiphany that fills and makes the photo.
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (October 25th, 1943 - Aereal section San Gioacchino)
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (October 16th, 1943 - Ghetto deportation)
What narrative choices have guided the telling of this exceptional story?
DM: It is a map, an itinerary of the resistance in Rome. Each photograph was taken on the same day and time as the events reported, although this meant having to wait a year to redo them when something went wrong. I wondered about what the atmosphere might be like when those events happened? What did the partisans have seen at that day and time? Was it cold, rainy, or sunny? I was not interested in nice pictures, but somehow re-enacting historical facts and looking at today’s city. I chased a suspended atmosphere, mixed with bewilderment in the face of loss for a story that concerns me but that I have not lived and that at best, I have heard it told by my grandparents. I wanted the photographs to be dry, without rhetoric but real. Although the medium is notably bulky and seems to add distance to what you are photographing, the use of a large-format camera has answered my needs. Looking at reality through the frosted glass helps me immerse myself totally in the scene and creates a strong relationship with the photo’s subject. What may seem like difficulties, such as long preparation times or the fact that usually only one plate is taken, are advantages that require greater attention, cleanliness, and awareness of the gaze.
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (December 20th, 1943 - Valle dell'Inferno)
We are talking about 50 large-format photographs. Can you tell us something about this approach, the pros, and cons that you have encountered? How did it influence the choice of medium in the development of the documentation?
DM: Although the medium is notably bulky and seems to add distance to what you are photographing, the use of a large-format camera has answered my needs. Looking at reality through the frosted glass helps me immerse myself totally in the scene and creates a strong relationship with the photo’s subject. What may seem like difficulties, such as long preparation times or the fact that usually only one plate is taken, are advantages that require greater attention, cleanliness, and awareness of the gaze.
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (March 3rd, 1944 - Anti raid shelter)
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (August 6th, 1944 - Piazza del Campidoglio)
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (December 28th, 1943 - Via della Lungara)
Each project is also a learning process. What did you achieve from this photographic investigation?
DM: From a historical point of view, I have learned that history is not made up only of significant events but of many minimal stories of ordinary people faced with the need to make choices. At a photographic level, I learned to be patient, study a lot, and reflect both on images and the construction of a photographic project. Allow me time for observation.
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (January 31st, 1944 - Via Milano)
How did you think of returning this precious work to the city and to historical knowledge?
DM: Right from the start, I imagined the work in book form precisely because of the fundamental role that the captions have. I imagine it as a classic landscape photo book, with large photos and extended captions on the facing page. I wish to include texts separate from the pictures, on a different paper, with interventions by historians and writers and the chronology of those months’ history. It would be nice to make a book enjoyable for schools to bring the story back to the kids. Seeing a known place, but to which one does not usually pay attention, as the scene of a historical event, loads that place with meaning, makes us identify with the protagonists of the time, and makes history almost a personal fact.
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (March 3rd, 1944 - Anti raid shelter)
© Daniele Molajoli from the series '271 Days' (1943 - 4-point nail)
Please indicate three books that are significant in relation to the reading of the project...
DM: For the history of the resistance in Rome there are many fundamental books, that of Alessandro Portelli on the attack in Via Rasella and the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine, the memorials of the Roman partisans such as Rosario Bentivegna, Mario Fiorentini and Carla Capponi, but the book that has helped and inspired me most is Roma città prigioniera, the prisoner city of Cesare De Simone (Mursia, 1994).
Among the photographic books certainly On this site (Steidl, 2012) by Joel Sternfeld. I only got the chance to read it after I had already decided what I wanted my work to be and it was a nice surprise to find that one of my favorite photographers had built his work in a very similar way. However, I cannot fail to mention the Campagna Romana (Knopf, 1992) of Sternfeld, of which there is also a quote in one of my photos.
Another photographer I had in mind throughout the project is Mitch Epstein, in his book Berlin (Steidl, 2011) there is a masterful use not only of large-format photography.
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