The Graven Face (1984)

Overview

Realized on the occasion of one of my photographic exhibitions of the same title dedicated to the Etruscans of Volterra. I intended to bring alive the funerary faces on sarcophagi, that, curiously, in shape resembled tv sets. I shot faces in color of living acquaintances in order to superimpose them on marble faces of dead people unknown to me, trying to give them an identity like those of the living. Using a battery of devices composed of a Super-8 projector, a 16mm projector and another one for slides, I rephotographed everything with a video camera directly on a unique screen effervescing with three cones of images in color, in black and white and at various speeds. The dissolves, both manual and non-manual, are manual in the proper sense of done by hand, mine and those of others; they were added simultaneously, to create variable human shutters.

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