Dino Ignani 80’s Dark Rome

Everyone was there at the opening of Dino Ignani’s 80’s Dark Rome exhibition at the Museum of Rome in Trastevere. A multitude of people were looking for each other and recognizing themselves in the portraits taken 40 years ago by Ignani of young people from Rome’s dark community. Between the photographs and the audience, between past and present, filtered an aura of protagonism, dense with memories and surprises; the images and their observers seemed to evoke the allegorical garb of an epochal mythology that Ignani had defined in his photographs.

80’s Dark Rome is in fact an exploration and document of a specific period of Roman youth culture. The images are portraits that focus on the Dark aesthetic in the early 1980s, that is, on the “young-adults who animated the clubs of the so-called dark scene in Rome, a black optical wedge that was not so univocal but of an unprecedented range of aesthetic and identity declinations that flowed back to other moods and styles of the time,” as Matteo Di Castro writes in the introduction to the book dedicated to the exhibition.

The historical moment is very significant, marked by the disintegration of the cultural and political militancy of the previous decade, and characterized by a retreat that is expressed by a swerve into externality, reversing ideology into a narcissistic and alternative mood. Subcultures such as goth and post-punk emerged that profoundly influenced theater, poetry, fashion, and especially music. Young Dark people, to some extent unwitting veterans of the leaden years, are characterized by the prevalence of a look based on the color black in clothing, accessories and attitudes, often in different combinations that testify to forms of individual expression and rebellion against codified social and aesthetic norms. Their portraits reflect themes of introspection, alienation, and above all a widespread search for belonging.

Dino Ignani between 1982 and 1985 follows the Dark groups he has become friends with to Roman nights, clubs and discos and systematically photographs them, following a constant method. He does not film them dancing or interacting with each other but in frontal poses, making them the iconic interpreters of collective drifts. His is “an open way of photographing the clubbing scene for which the protagonists of a movement are attracted, not by a selective and exclusive process but by a willingness and spirit of participation in a common imaginary, style and desire” (Matteo Di Castro).

On the premises Ignani would stand in a quiet corner with his photographic equipment, SLR on a tripod, frontal framing, black and white film, preferably neutral set, minimal margin left to the background, continuous lighting with a 1,000-watt spotlight and umbrella, slow shutter speed. One shot each and a line was created, everyone was well willing to participate in this “game,” Dino recounts.

The photos come to form a series in which codes, stereotypes and individuality intersect. The faces of Dark girls and boys pose without smiling, carefully dressed and made up, their eyes fixed in the lens with a piercing gaze that seems to share that of the photographer portraying them. Different and similar looks that tell an autobiographical and cultural dimension.

Creating a photographic set on the premises and inviting the participants of this small and disenchanted cohort to be photographed not only makes photography an interactive experience, but also allows us to capture the essence and immediacy of emotions between perception and identification. Because frontal posing has no escape route, it stands outside the immediate temporality and improvisation of the snapshot. It is a mental, programmed method; in the pose, the subject waits for the shot, certainly poses, masks himself, but above all he wants his image — face, look and body — to be fixed in that way and at that moment, establishing a kind of complicity with the photographer.

There is a conceptual tension in the pose that corresponds perfectly to photography’s ability to modify the object it captures, interpreting it far beyond mere recording and placing perception on the border of unimpeachable evidence. And this process of elaboration is configured in Dino Ignani’s photography as an element of a series that takes on the sense of an inquiry into what is portrayed, what it means to the photographer and to those who are photographed.

It is no coincidence that Dino has always focused on portraiture understood as an element of a complex network of relationships in the times and spaces of experience, using photography as a tool of analysis capable of filtering physiognomies and expressions, environments and contexts; he has privileged above all poets and writers to whom he has dedicated now famous and valuable series such as Intimate Portraits.

The exhibition 80’s Dark Rome closed on January 12, 2025: the book Dino Ignani, Dak Roma 1982-1985, edited by Matteo Di Castro with Elena Marasca, texts by Matteo Di Castro, Daniela Amenta, Diego Mormorio, Viaindustriae Publishing 2024, remains. Above all, the creative ability of Dino Ignani remains, as he continues to enrich his archive by accentuating the performative procedure of the whole project, through inclusion in the social dimension; he photographed day by day with his cell phone the visitors of his exhibition and posted the images on his facebook profile 80’s Dark Portraits by Dino Ignani.

With the lightness of a personal and friendly welcome he is thus making another series, the Visitors; it is a further version of the symbolic meaning of the portrait and its relationship to faces, faces, posture and clothing, circumstance and context (the project begun with Vernissage at the 2003 Venice Biennale should also be mentioned in this regard). In Visitors a dialogue comes to form with apparent ease and naturalness between the photographer, the spaces and images of his exhibition, and the kind of person who is the person who goes to see an exhibition. And in particular this exhibition 80’s Dark Rome.

The photographic set is now the exhibition itself, with the dynamism of the path and perceptions; the rhythm of the series is different, with less circumscribed intentionality, differentiated encounters, and more room for contingency. There are groups and people caught unawares in a few snapshots as they look at the photos; but in the majority the shots are frontal, the backgrounds are chosen by the visitors themselves, again posed but with a casual look and mostly smiling with that slightly amused, slightly so-so smile that is placed on the face when we are photographed. There are young and old, friends, artists, other photographers. Images that make up another exhibit within the exhibit and weave a wonderful dialogue with the photos of the Dark. And there are also some girls swaggering back to the darks of yesteryear with a perfectly set look but updated on the fluorescent and techno outfit of the 21st century. Other looks then, faces, characters and contexts that continue in Visitors the short circuit between image, invention, perception, identification and metaphor that characterizes Dino Ignani’s portrait making. As the photographic visible comes alive and a resonates in the interconnections of social.