A source of inspiration:
"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week."
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
My photographs are often used to study objects of everyday life, the role of actors or sets, usually with a different purpose from the function for which they were built, following a route deliberately transpositional, more akin to painting in an allegorical sense than strictly speaking to photography. Food is another element that I use frequently in my photographs: fruits, vegetables but also flowers, plants, meat and fish.
The fish, in particular for the great expressive power which a photo studio can develop, is well suited to play a role as an actor, taking on human behaviour and poses, in fact intensifying the contradictions and exasperating aspects of society. This picture is a preview of my upcoming work, Pacfish, oriented towards denouncing the serious risks of ecological, environmental and humanitarian disaster brewing at global level, related to the indiscriminate exploitation of marine resources through overfishing, waste, contamination due to pollution, destruction of fishing grounds and areas of recovery in all the oceans of the world.
I call it Pacfish, because the modus operandi of humans in relation to the fish species is the same as Pacman, the famous electronic game, born along with personal computers at the beginning of the current information age, a game without any strategy, where the goal is to destroy, eat, consume, as many elements as are found along the path of the player.
And this is what we are doing today with the overfishing, the destruction and pollution of waters and coastal areas, with the ever increasing demand for fish, compared to a dramatic increase of waste and misuse of it. It's a process that is leading to impoverishment of quantity and variety of animal species that inhabit the seas and oceans, which turns against human themselves now, for years now, with gradually reduction of the size of fish.
This work, like my other recent works, with literary extracts presented next to the images, encourages the viewer to subsequent own searches. In my art projects about ethical, social or philosophical issues, this combination gives me the opportunity to suggest to my fellow citizens the background of my thoughts: the art must not or should not be confined to passive observation, but must represent an element of cultural research and reflection. Only then can it enrich the spirit of who creates and who uses it.
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Daniele D'Antonio, lives and works in Turin, Italy. After a career as a geologist, he began his artistic career in photography and installations.
His thesis is that all forms of art and cultural studies are not simply an accessory of society but one of its most important motors, in addition to his projects now offers this type of production to companies and institutions wishing to motivate the outside world at higher levels than the simple promotion of classic commercial advertising.
www.dantoniodaniele.it