In this photo by Mary Ellen Mark named \u201cThe Damm Family in Their Car\u201d shot in Los Angeles in 1987 there\u2019s simply everything. Not only the story of a family in a frame of its life, but the one of a nation too.<\/p>\n
What do you see? A family inside a car. They are not arranged, they are posing but in a natural way, like they were really there just like that, inside what is probably their car and their home too. A poor family (portrait of a peculiar kind of people from a specific class) that owns a car and nothing else. But they take care of eachother: the father and husband embraces gently his wife, the daughter caresses and protects her younger little brother. He\u2019s staring at something outside the frame. It\u2019s not the photographer, we don\u2019t know what it is. Maybe it\u2019s the future, maybe it doesn\u2019t look so bright.<\/p>\n
Father, mother and daughter are looking right into the camera. They know it\u2019s going to be like that and nothing else.
\nHe\u2019s saying with his eyes \u201cThat\u2019s all I\u2019ve got\u201d but he\u2019s proud of that. He cares about his family.
\nShe the mother is abandoned into his arms. It\u2019s like she just can\u2019t stand no more. She\u2019s exhausted.<\/p>\n
Her daughter is like her, 20 or more years before. It\u2019s like you can see the same person in different times but in the same time. And the little woman is already conscious of what\u2019s ahead: no hope, this is our life. She\u2019s like her mother, grown like her but in a younger body. But she knows already everything. She sadly looks into her future, behind her.<\/p>\n
Portions of the country where they live are all around: a dirty road where they parked their car and their home. Their car is probably no more a movable object: it just stands there, symbol of a broken society that doesn\u2019t produce anything more. The same car is a frame within the frame, with its windows creating a boundary between their life and the one of the country where they live. A photographic and a symbolic one. Protection and exclusion at the same time.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t know anything about the Damm family before but now we know everything. There\u2019s their story and the story of their country at the same time. Right into a single frame. Like every story there\u2019s a beginning, something in the middle and an end. We\u2019re looking at the whole story in the blink of an eye. A story needs a teller and a receiver. Mary Ellen Mark is telling us the Damm story. We\u2019re hearing, almost 30 years later.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Storytelling sembra essere una parola magica in questi tempi. Come qualsiasi altra parola, finisce presto per essere abusata.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33706,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,93],"tags":[76,206,77],"class_list":["post-33029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fotografia","category-photography","tag-fotografia","tag-mary-ellen-mark","tag-photography"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinopietropoli.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}