ANDREA CALESTANI – (Langhirano PARMA 1951) lover of photography.
Sometimes recklessly and severely infatuated with his visions, he admits to living his second photographic life. More or less the first began in 1974, when, little more than a boy, one day he happened by chance to buy a 6×6 format twin lens from a disinterested friend. In truth, his father had already taken care of the photographic weaning, about ten years earlier, when he handed him a KODAK INSTAMATIC50, to immortalize the indispensable snapshots of the family. But it was with the 6×6 around his neck, seized in his hands, and his head bent to crop shots in the cockpit, that that falling in love revealed itself in all its strength.

For a decade he lived in the magical and wonderful world of analogic photography. Shooting, development, printing: all strictly in black and white. In the evening, after work, he organized his own rudimentary darkroom in the bathroom at home. Then came the reflex cameras and Kodachrome64 slides, mostly to document reportage of travels in the “easy rider” style across half of Europe. His first FIAF membership card dates back to 1976, along with his membership in the “Cinefotoamatori Leonessa” club in Brescia. But that was a time when elderly amateur photographers still lived visions of a pictorialist photography, imbued with tough technicalities. Which really didn’t suit the feeling of the aesthetic impulses of his soul. He was looking for emotional contact with things and people, shapes, colors. Within the modernity of an era (the second half of the seventies) peculiar to transition and social and urban transformations with strong connotations.

He never met a master who could give him method to his self-taught photography. Nonetheless he promoted his works in circles; in some group exhibitions he exhibited some forays into the bubbling social scene between the 1970s and 1980s. Experience, the latter, soon abandoned due to a brutal attack he suffered (especially the camera) during a political demonstration.

Then the interruption. Cause the supposed exclusive mandate, for a few decades, to photograph his children, their adventures, the trips of a new family; and the undertaking of the free profession which left no room for interests unrelated to work. Therefore, despite heart and passion, photography (by fate or by choice – it is unknown) was not his profession. Now, with the advent of quiescence, he meets his dear, old and demanding, sweetened lover again. In the last five years of the new millennium there are about fifteen personal and collective shows and exhibitions in which he has participated and organized. Workshops and contests with prestigious internationally renowned photographers have inspired style and method: fashion, portraiture, landscape, street photography. Not a theme in particular, but photography understood as a frame for the aesthetic expression of spaces and mental forms.