V. Frames and Moments of Daily Life

Photographing a product or a company facility is certainly nothing new. It has always been done, and everyone does it.

What changes is how it is done. At Carraro, the approach has always unfolded along two parallel yet distinct paths. On the one hand, still-life images of products, later replaced by renderings, for catalogues; on the other, photographs of workplaces and application environments, such as agricultural landscapes, construction sites and unpaved roads. Regardless of the specific setting, however, the stylistic hallmark has always remained the same: to tell a story and, in doing so, to present oneself in an original way.

This is clearly explained by Marco Zanta, a photographer who has known the Carraro Group well for many years, in his contribution to this new issue of Carraro Cultura: “I did not know much about their history, but I immediately understood that we could speak a common language. I was trying to pursue my own vision of the industrial world through contemporary photography, and they embraced my proposals from the very beginning. I realised that the ownership were not looking for advertising, but for a vision. It was a completely empathetic encounter, something that rarely happens.”

In his analysis, Daniele De Luigi, curator of contemporary art and photography, adds further insights by retracing the stages of an iconographic journey that has involved countless photographers over time in depicting industry, each with a different interpretative approach. These range from documentary and critical perspectives, focusing on “workers, cogs in the gigantic productive machine, heroes of their era, symbols of exploitation and of the struggle for rights,” to a more positivist view portraying the factory as a centre of “modernity and human and social progress.” The narrative then evolves towards the complexity of postmodern industry, where the worker, on the one hand, “seems to disappear within the complexity of automated processes controlled by information technologies,” while on the other is “depicted at ease in an environment characterised by cleanliness and safety.”

As an ideal culmination of this journey, the chapter dedicated to Jessica Backhaus fits perfectly into the narrative. The photographer shaped Carraro’s image in 2014 through a distinctive gaze, capable of revealing unexpected aspects of familiar places. From an unusual texture created by forklift tyre marks on a factory floor to three components casually resting on a workbench, appearing like fragments of a suspended moment in life. A beautiful way of looking beyond the obvious.