If you happen to find yourself in San Francisco for the slew of workshops, lectures, panels and tastings that is the Slow Food Nation ‘08 festival, make sure to stop by the Museo ItaloAmericano for “SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town” featuring the photographs of Douglas Gayeton which is on exhibit through Sept. 10.
Until recently, filmmaker and photographer Douglas Gayeton had been living in a restored 16th century convent in Pistoia, Tuscany. Bathed in warm sepia tones, his photo montages (or “flat film” as he calls them) reflect the food, landscape and people which surrounded him. There’s Alice, who raises a nearly extinct chicken, ‘la livornese’; Daria who specializes in gathering wild salad and Domenico, an elderly pig butcher who’s been at his trade for more than half a century. Their stories, anecdotes and recipes accompany the photographs, handwritten directly on their surfaces in a round cursive script.
I spoke with Gayeton, who now lives on a farm in Petaluma, about his images:
How did you end up in Pistoia, Italy? My grandmother’s Italian. I was working and living in Paris and really not liking France. I bought a place in Italy, part of a convent from the 1700’s and spent two years restoring it. I ended up making a TV show about it called “Lost in Italy.” Then PBS contacted me about making a film about Slow Food.”
Were you aware of the Slow Food movement? Well, of course, but, as I explained to PBS, nobody in Italy knew what it was because the principles of Slow Food are principles that every Italian has. Food and wine are pretty integral aspects of what defines their culture. I could go and document people like Carlo Petrini but I think it’s much truer to document the lives of normal people and to show the way they interact with food or how food is fundamental to their lives. That’s really going to get to the principles of slow food much better than documenting the figureheads of the movement.
So I began filming and taking photographs. I also began writing on the photographs as I was talking to people to gather all their background information. One of the elderly people from a village said, “Oh I was very, very confused. I thought you were making a film! This is so much better that you’re doing it with photographs and writing!” I stopped and I looked at what I was doing and I realized she was right! So I just decided to focus on the photographs.
How did you approach your subjects and were they receptive to your idea to photograph them? Well, first of all, Italians are incredibly open people and I think the idea that an American was not only learning their language but also interested in these kind of cultural aspects of their lives intrigued them. All of the photographs have an Italian or Tuscan saying as the title. It got to the point where people who I began to profile started telling me what I was going to call the photographs even before I did it! So I really felt like in many ways it was collaborative.
What did you learn about food as a result of your photography and experience in Pistoia? I now live on a farm. My wife and I make goat milk ice cream entirely based on the principles of Slow Food. We originally did it as something that we thought we were going to just kind of sell at farmer’s markets….and we thought we were going to be these really cool, groovy guys that showed up in an ice cream truck. We’re now available in 2,000 stores across the country.
Finally, why do you refer to your photographs as “flat films”? These photographs are actually not made from a single image. Each photograph is made up of as many as a hundred photographs put together. Sometimes a single photograph will take me four hours to make! I want to explain the entire story in a photograph. I was actually able to take a photograph, which is a moment in time, and infuse it with a story by setting it in time that moves. It’s a photograph that takes on the aspects of a film.
What I see when there’s a show, and it’s really so powerful for me, is that people are in these groups that are going from photograph to photograph and as they go, they’re talking about the image. The narratives aren’t written starting in the upper left and go to the bottom right. The narratives are all over the image. You have to piece it together.
What I end up hearing is that people start comparing their own personal experiences or things in their own lives or in their grandparents lives to the stories that are being told in the photograph. So it becomes this really beautiful communal experience.
I think that’s what also attracted the people from Slow Food Nation. This is anything but elitist - the expression of these people’s lives and their experiences. I think so many things about food tend to be elitist because of the costs of buying things that are either organic or natural and I think this really shows normal everyday people who are no different from us except that they’re from a different culture.
Catch “Slow: Life in A Tuscan Town” noon-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays through Sept. 10 at the Museo ItaloAmericano, Fort Mason Center, Building C, S.F. Free. 415-673-2200, www.italoamericano.org. Meet the artist from noon-4 p.m. Sat. Aug. 30.
