Marco Gualazzini: Resilient

A definition of Resilience from a psychological perspective,”the ability to cope positively with traumatic events, to positively reorganise one’s life in the face of difficulty, to rebuild oneself while remaining sensitive to the opportunities life offers, without losing one’s own identity. When faced with adversity, resilient people are able – despite everything – to handle it constructively, to breathe new life into their existence, and even to turn their misfortune into something positive.”

It is important to provide a reminder of exactly what resilience is, to grasp why, and to what extent, it’s the very best title Marco Gualazzini could possibly have given to his first, and significant, published volume. You’ll gain a better understanding still by looking at the photographs – or rather experiencing the photographs Gualazzini offers us, with their splendid captions that contextualise the shots and the stories. Delve into the stories, observe the images, absorb them. You’ll immediately realise we’re in an immensely difficult environment: difficult to live in, to imagine, to conceive, and for this very reason, a major source of food for thought, pause, self-analysis and – if you choose – improvement.

Gualazzini takes us into that side of Africa we prefer to ignore, delete from our minds and our conscience. He shows us eyes we’d prefer not to meet, situations we can’t imagine, circumstances we’d like to believe don’t concern us and that vanish from our hearts because they’re so far away. But they’re moving ever closer, and one of the significant merits of this book is to sharpen our sensibility to the wretched fate of these children, men and women, and to prompt at least a moment of reflection on those spotless, privileged lives of ours we’re always complaining about. Seen from this point of view, this is not a book of photographs, and Gualazzini is not so much a photographer as a witness, a messenger, an ambassador bearing a message of huge importance.