Photographer Alessandro Puccinelli recently revisited a project from 1999, a book project documenting the grape harvest in Italy. How would he approach it now, using digital cameras instead of film? In this first in a series of mini-profiles of photographers doing interesting projects, we asked him about it.
Q: How did you become interested in photographing the harvest in this manner?
I had an artist residency for Festival Sete Sois Sete Luas, a festival that connects Italy, France and Portugal, where I actually live. This allowed me to go back and photograph the same subject after all these years. It’s been a sort of a challenge for myself and showed me how my photography has changed over the years. At first I thought about using techniques like multiple exposure, which I have been using recently in my personal work—a more abstract approach. But when I got there, I instinctively changed my mind and decided to go bak to a more “reportage” style.
I did that as soon as I met the people at work. I found them extremely friendly, and they didn’t make any problem at all with my photographing them. Also, things have changed since I photographed the harvest almost 20 years ago. Back then the harvesters were older local people. Now, the harvesters are young people mostly from East Europe as well as some local young French. It was a more cosmopolitan group, perhaps not so connected with the wine culture but they were giving me a very contemporary view of the wine industry these days. I also found that it’s a kind of job that is rapidly disappearing as in many places wine producers are already using machinery to pick up grapes.
So I decided to approach this work, in a quite classical way. I focused on how despite having people from countries were the culture of wine does not exist, the bucolic atmosphear was still there, people were working hard but were also smiling and make jokes, it was a nice place to be. The other aspect was the hard work in itself or even more, I wanted to show what really happens under the grapes, I wanted to show real action of that particular moment when the grape leaves the plant to become wine.
I saw many pictures of hands picking grapes in the past, but they were too nice and clean for my taste, I wanted something more chaotic.
2) Which photographers are your greatest influences and why?
I think I’m influenced by many photographers, especially Michael Ackerman, Paulo Nozolino and Thomas Joshua Cooper because of their ability of being real without having to be very descriptive. Their images leave space to imagination carrying always some mystery with them.
However, my main influences come from painting, especially Romantic painters like JW Turner and John Martin, but also what followed them. I like the Impressionists for how they changed their approach to painting, until abstract and abstract expressionism. ackson Pollock is a perpetual font of inspiration.
3) What gear did you use for this project?
I used a Nikon d810 with a 35mm lens to photograph the people and the land and a Sony 7r with a Sony 14-24mm lens to photograph the action under the grapes.
The images under the grapes were shot in manual focus and a shutter speed of about 1/160 as i wanted to leave room to a bit of chaos and confusion without having to be nice and clean. The RAW images were post-processed in Capture One Pro 10 which has an amazing shadow/highlight recovery that helped a lot in those images taken under the grapes.
