"In this exploration of the photographs of the Italian photographer Marialba Russo I want to highlight a selection of work that shows the developments of themes and styles over a career. This I term an "Evolving Retrospective" and I‘m delighted to be able to show this series of projects that are so firmly founded in a world of tradition, mystery and folklore." [Alan Griffiths - May 17, 2006]
 
Incanto
 
within a body that remains
and the other departs
mute is the distance between them
the word becomes confused in the things it once loved
and everything seems to sustain it
and then nothing can approach
reach out to touch
the distance is the distance of nothingness
in the uncertain depths
the existence of suspended bodies surprises
the hand moves beyond
withdraws floats
searching for a lost body
in the reflected image it is like existing without time
beyond the sound of words opening a wait
and everything flows nearly as though it were a certainty
 
Marialba Russo (Translation by Laura Biagi)
 
Roma, Fasti Moderni – il disordine del tempo
Rome, Fasti Moderni – the disorder of time (Mudima Foundation, Milan 1993)
 
"With this work on archaeological Rome Marialba Russo moves from her photographic investigation of ritual and tradition towards a more intimate and analytical photography, where landscapes is a metaphor for the marking of interior time." (Text by Daniela Palazzoli)
 
the time that divides the past from the present
is only a slight illusion that makes memory more silent and deeper
And if questions and answers grow subtly confused in the wake of it
and if the silence turns into words
words can only retrace their way through the signs of silence
and immediately create an abstraction
the abstraction of a figure where beyond it one feels
the still obscure meaning of something to come.
This the disorder of time.

 
Marialba Russo (translation by Laura Biagi)
 
At the restaurant 29 september 1974
 
"These are pages in a notebook where I sketch barely visible shadows, some lighter some darker, of the different experiences of seeing. It is not their wish to be mere witnesses to my experiences; these images desire to remain in the same state of vivacity and ambiguity as those of figures and of the events that gave rise to them. This desire is not born of love for the phenomenon but rather of fear that these established ways of looking inevitably capture in the safe mesh of their own rules those rituals and cultures that continue to elude them.
 
In any event my camera has necessarily captured them by casting light on the scene where the rituals play out in the twilight their forms of origin, of what is diverse, and what has survived. So then I will lay the pages of these notebooks onto those of an imaginary rule-book, so that like a negative on a positive the signs of the positive become less certain."" (Marialba Russo, 1976)