Unscripted

the gallery STEINER presents

Photographs by Riccardo Botta

I am an opera singer, and I love the theatre. My work is to bring characters to life, and to do so I observe the world, filter it, and transform what I have absorbed into action on stage. Photography springs from the same way of seeing: it is how I capture what strikes me in reality, an attitude, a gesture, a proportion, a geometry.

Only when I was invited to exhibit did I realise what my photographs had in common. In many of them the figures are small, almost swallowed by a space that is itself man-made: streets, façades, squares, like unintentional stage sets. For a photographer this might be a mistake; for me it is a way of seeing that comes from the theatre. As a member of the audience, I have always been fascinated by watching a tiny figure enter a vast hall and, as the performance unfolds, grow until it fills it entirely.

Something else I discovered later: whoever steps into the frame is almost always observing something too. An altar, the street, a poster, a statue. I watch them, and they watch the world.

The seventeen photographs on display follow this path, from the figure barely visible in space to the human being who fully inhabits it. And once the curtain has fallen, nature takes back the stage.

Riccardo Botta

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As in an opera libretto, each photograph is accompanied by a stage direction and a quotation from music theatre, drama or art song.