"It is my work", Giacomo Puccini wrote down by hand on the postcard which reproduced one of his shots, sent in 1907 to a painter friend.
A sort of reclamation at the dawn of the twentieth century of photography as an art form, like painting, by the composer of Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Manon Lescaut.
The score of the world of the Tuscan musician, therefore, was not only made up of the notes that described the torments and passions of the human soul in his unforgettable masterpieces but also of the images that he loved to fix with his camera, a panoramic Kodak produced in starting from 1899. Documenting this unprecedented aspect of one of the giants of melodrama is the Ragghianti Foundation of Lucca which brought together around ninety original shots in the fresco room of the San Michieletto Complex, presenting them for the first time in the exhibition What Eye in the World .
Puccini photographer, with free entry from 16 February to 1 April.
"These hitherto unknown vintage shots tell us the world seen from the composer's eye in a never banal way, they are not the travel photos of a tourist but often have the sparkle of a work of art", Paolo Bolpagni tells ANSA, director of the Foundation and curator of the exhibition with Gabriella Biagi Ravenni and Diana Toccafondi.
Puccini was attracted in particular by the nature of the places he knew well, Torre del Lago, Abetone, Maremma, Ansedonia, Lake Massaciuccoli.
'"His landscape photos have a poetic quality, something that refers to the style of pictorialist photography but he also knew how to be ironic like when he portrayed his wife Elvira in Egypt by making her sit on a sarcophagus" observes Bolpagni.
From that trip Puccini did not bring home images of sphinxes, pyramids or monuments but people and landscapes.
Photography, among other things, was sometimes useful to him for staging his dramas in music.
Thinking about the premiere of Fanciulla del West in New York in 1910, he took photos of the Abetone woods and sent them to the set designers to give an idea of what he wanted.
What is particularly striking is an undated shot, the Canale della Bufalina in Torre del Lago which must have been so dear to him that it ended up in his album, now on display like his Kodak.
The photos, mostly created with the aristotype technique (printing on collodion paper), come from the immense archive of the Simonetta Puccini Foundation, named after the musician's niece, who died in 2017, who also manages the villa museum in Torre del Lago. In this flood of material, a stream of photographs had been identified that had not been analysed.
With the contribution of the Puccini Study Center of Lucca, the Ragghianti Foundation therefore conducted team work to "bring into focus" the musician's hidden passion and tell it also with his portraits taken by others and images that describe him in his dimension private, with relatives and friends in moments of everyday life.
That vertical photo of the surroundings of the village of Chiatri with the unmistakable ''signature'' of the composer, the shadow of him at the bottom right with his hat cocked at all angles, makes you smile.
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