In these images we are able to re-explore the chronology of pain in human life: from the pain and confusion in our infancy with our pre-natal and post-natal mother, to the persecution complex of our aggressiveness that brings back, as a boomerang, a sense of guilt and the need of expiation, from the pain of caducity, of our separation from the object of love, the loss of a dear one, to the pain of a necessary self-revision and the following feeling of being alone.

And this is not a useless suffering; on the contrary, it is a source of knowledge of ourselves, as philosophy and psychoanalysis taught us. Pain is a part of our lives and through pain humanity can acquire wisdom and understanding.
Surely pain can generate knowledge but it is also true that knowledge can induce pain.

The pain, the “pathos” of viewing these images, of hearing these stories, makes us “aware” in the sense of “Pathein mathos”- from ancient Greek- I learn though suffering. Surely this kind of knowledge, which represent many things but indifference to the condition of man, a theme very central in Savino’s work, makes us suffer once more.

Even if pain is a very personal feeling, by indentifying with these photographs, much more intensely than through many intellectual and verbal analysis, pain reaches and envelop us at a personal level.

Savino is a photographic master of identification interplay and reminds us, along with Marina Cvetacva that “ The soul, vertex of spirituality for the common man, is for the spiritual man, almost flesh”.

Guglielmo Campione

Italian, medical doctor,
psychiatrist and psychoanalyst,
accomplished diver, musician and writer.