Giovanni Maria Sacco
TIFA 2025 Interview with Giovanni Maria Sacco
1st Place winner in Book, Professional, “Metafisica Concreta / Concrete Metaphysics”
Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about your background in photography?
I was a university professor of computer science for 30 years until I resigned to follow my passion for photography. I have been photographing for a long time, first on film, then digitally and finally digitally and on large format film. My interest for art is not limited to photography and I was the publisher of an acclaimed CD-ROM series on painters of the Italian Renaissance (Piero della Francesca, Antonello da Messina, Masaccio), which included the first hypertextual edition of Vasari’s Lives of Artists.
My motto is Walt Whitman’s: “I am large. I contain multitudes.” My photographs embrace many different themes: modern ruins (large factories, mainly), architecture, still life, portraits, nudes, etc. In all these themes, what I seek is beauty, which I find both in the impermanence and decline of human things and in the impassibility of architectural constructions.
To quote Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan: “For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length–and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.”
Beyond these different aspects, my main theme is death or, to put it less bluntly, the impermanence of human things: beauty and dignity in silent decline. At the same time, I am deeply interested in metaphysics: in this cycle of life and death, which seems meaningless, is there anything that is immutable?
I don’t like routine and clichés, so I think it’s more interesting and stimulating to approach the same theme from different perspectives and, if necessary, with different techniques. I strongly believe in experimentation, not as an end in itself but as a tool to enrich expressiveness.
In some ways, I identify with the Metaphysical School, Magical Realism, and New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). To this I add characteristics of my work that depend heavily on my cultural background:
- from Lao Tzu, I derive the importance of emptiness;
- from William of Ockham, the principle of economy, which requires using only what is necessary for the purpose, nothing more and nothing less;
- from Piero della Francesca, Edward Hopper, and Vilhelm Hammershøi, the metaphysical suspension of being, that is, the timelessness of the image;
- from Giorgio De Chirico and the Metaphysical School, I follow the intent: “Painting what cannot be seen” is the poetics of the metaphysical movement. My intent is to photograph the inner, invisible essence of things, and that which remains unchanged and exists beyond the passing of time, subtly intertwined with death itself;
- from most painters and many photographers, the fundamental importance of composition.
In 2023 I published the book “Silent Theaters” with Kehrer Verlag. Since 2015 I have received more than 120 awards in major international competitions: Tokyo International Foto Awards, International Photo Awards (IPA), Fine Art Photography Awards, Prix de la Photographie Paris (PX3), Architecture Master Prize, among others. My works have been exhibited in Turin, Milan, Rome, Trieste, Venice, Arles, Glasgow, New York, Miami, Dali (China), Dubai, Tokyo and Zurich.
I use digital and film cameras from 6×6 to 20x25cm. You are welcomed to take a look at my site www.gmsacco.com to have an idea of the breadth of my interests.
How did this idea of “concrete metaphysics” first take shape, and what drew you to explore metaphysical concepts through photography?
Metaphysics has been a deep interest of mine since adolescence. Not the metaphysics of Aristotle or Scholasticism, but that of De Chirico and Mahayana Buddhism: the belief that there is something more real behind the theater of our perception. Something that is at once mysterious, disturbing, indifferent to humanity, and wonderfully beautiful.
Over time, I found hints in Italian rationalist architecture: the absence of decoration emphasizes the essence of things, as they are, without frills or embellishments, completely bare. The minimalist rigor of form is also an important indication. As Newton writes: “nature is in fact simple and does not abound in superfluous causes.” Another fundamental aspect is that the truth of things is, by definition, eternal. The reference to architectural archetypes, first and foremost the arch, in a modern key indicates the existence of something that is immune to the passage of time.
How do you use photography – a medium rooted in physical reality – to suggest what lies beyond the visible?
My idea was to give clues, such as those I mentioned earlier, rather than using metaphors to describe the indescribable. Clues are the characteristics that the viewer can find in common among the various photographs and which, I hope, can lead them to see what lies behind perception. I was delighted to learn from Flavia Concina, author of the essay on metaphysics in my book, that a similar process had been proposed by T.S. Eliot to characterize the mechanisms used by English metaphysical poets. T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative is a literary technique where specific external objects, situations, or events are presented to evoke a precise emotion in the audience, rather than the author directly stating the feeling. It’s a formula for emotion, connecting internal feelings to concrete external realities that trigger an immediate, shared sensory and emotional response in the reader.
What does winning at the Tokyo International Foto Awards mean to you personally and professionally?
Being named Book Photographer of the Year is a tremendous honour, especially since this is the second year in a row that I have received this award. For me, it confirms the importance of my work and my approach, which eschews flashy photography and originality for its own sake.
Professionally, this award has been viewed with great interest by my publishers and the galleries I work with.
Looking back at Concrete Metaphysics as a completed book, what did this project change in the way you think about photography as a tool for philosophical inquiry, and how might this influence your future work?
Concrete Metaphysics is the second book in a trilogy. The first book, Silent Theaters (Kehrer 2023), deals with the impermanence of human things, using the metaphor of abandoned factories, in which man is physically absent but whose presence is implicit, almost ghostly.
Concrete Metaphysics did not really change the way I think, but rather reinforced two points. One is the importance of the sequence of images in the construction of the book, including the use of blank pages to interrupt the flow. I think that determining the sequence should be a collaborative effort between the author and the editor, involving other people as well. The author does not always have the necessary distance from the images to find the best sequence for the reader.
The second point is more technical. The use of large-format film in part of the book has convinced me more and more that this technique is best suited to what I want to say, both in terms of cleanliness and in terms of the tonal scale of the images.