Starting from the awareness that the core of FPB’s work is the sensation, the stimulus of perception, we can feel the joy of living coming out from each picture of his.

The artist thinks that symbolic photography, so different from the “traditional one” gives to the art of observation many hints to reflect and becomes, when its best and most important forms are printed, something to venerate taking on the symbolic function of the terracotta figures that stood for our ancestors.

Since he strongly believes in the self-teaching, in the freedom of thought, daughter of no father, FPB is one of the forerunners of the photophilosophy, the expressive form which best suits his social and political ideals.

Like everyone who really believes in Art, who feels the will to create throbbing in his soul, the artist has often considered himself as a “persecuted”, who sees going by unique, essential moments that symbolize the power of life, the co-existence of rational madness and wise awareness, and can’t do anything to stop them.

In a language that is not verbal and not hermetic at the same time, he has attempted to use photography to put into the foreground the core of events, authentic moments, real comparisons between the life of humble, peoples untouched by the irrational progress, and those who have taken the dead end of wild materialism, where sensations, pleasures, are mistaken for happiness.

The author did often not use the flash not to modify the essence of the situation, the emotions of that “given” moment which must become a sort of anachronistic accusation. He was, though, aware that acting that way he would exclude himself from a society aimed at the progress but the destiny of which was decided.

He has then sought the right compromise to keep the purity of photographic art, the splendour of the complicated and yet simple device that allows us to shape the light until it sculptures the message that has to reach the observer’s eyes.

 

 

 

  

 

That impulse was the strength that pushed him to more and more distant borders seeking ancestral Joy surviving in the smiles of people who own nothing but possess the most precious gift, freedom, even from material goods.

Travelling from an island to another, he has drawn a precise route where the traditional continents are replaced by universal territories, Love, Purity, Friendship, Nature, and where the only significant co-ordinates are those drawn on the Cartesian axes of emotions and feelings.

During his never ending wandering, FPB never wanted to exploit, though he had more than one opportunity to do it, the images of death and suffering that his camera came across. He voluntarily chose, and with no regrets, to be an outsider in the dominant fashion of photojournalism. Due to the deep meaning of the phrase “moral and intellectual honesty”, he has never taken advantage of miseries to grow rich.

Since he strongly opposes the brutal images we are used to and that have conditioned us making us asking for more and more cruelty, the artist proposed a return to a philosophy for all, a subtle and logical art that leads to reflection.

That is his Joy: seeing that, in spite of deceitful appearance, in the hearts of western people there is still a place for feelings and, above all, for meditation and not only for a paradoxical vision of life symbolized by the slogan “there is no way like the American way”.

Since it leads to reflection, his link to loneliness, contradictory, complained upon/about? But deeply desired, will be of use, like his efforts, sometimes beyond his limits, are.