Davide Bramante

The young Sicilian photographer Davide Bramante has, at first sight, many aims in common with those of the Futurists: the movement and inter-penetration of his superimposed images have all the dynamic energy we find in Boccioni, for example. And yet despite this, and despite Bramante’s use of a technology undreamed of by the Futurists, his sense of the action of memory, even of nostalgia, is quite distinct from their forward-looking philosophy (which by now has the pathos of all past avant-garde ideologies).

The artist himself has this to say of his work: ‘my way of photographing is the same as my way of remembering, thinking, dreaming, and hoping, all of which happens through temporal and spatial superimposition’. In other words, his work is as much about the past and present as the future, and his simultaneous visions are the total recreation of a place and society rather than a utopian idea of what it should be. Exemplary in this respect are his recreations of Dublin, part of the ongoing series of photos he calls My Own Rave. O’Connell Street is the basis of one image, recognisable with all its landmarksffic and buses (‘Before Nelson’s pillar trails slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston park…’ to quote James Joyce). And yet above and through the image hovers a poster portraying Madonna, a Janus-like name and image haunting Catholic Ireland: sex and religion.

As in so many of his portrayals of the various cities of the world he has travelled and recreated in his photos, here he encapsulates a whole society, all of its aspects available at the same time, each influencing the other. As he himself says, ‘These are the exact photograph of contemporary society’. And yet they are also an exact photograph of himself and his background, ‘a little Arabian, Norman, Byzantine, Spanish…’ He is the eternal Mediterranean wanderer like Ulysses or like the Jews, and like the Irish themselves too: at home everywhere yet never at home. And another personage comes inevitably to mind looking at the never-ending allusive variety of this Dublin street. Is Bramante perhaps the Leopold Bloom of photography…? (see biography)