Enzo Ragazzini (b. Rome, 1934) is an Italian photographer and Op-Art pioneer. He began his photographic activity in the 1950’s, when photographers were still uncommon in Italy, experimenting with “photomechanics” in a garage darkroom he built by himself. For the 1960 Olympics in Rome, three murals of his revolutionary “optically altered” images of boxers, wrestlers, and basketballers were integrated into the Palazzetto dello Sport dell’Eur designed by Pierluigi Nervi. In 1965, he moved to London, and was featured in the ICA’s first photography exhibition (1969) Four Photographers in Contrast, while also having a solo show at Modern Art Oxford for his abstract imagery. While Ragazzini created work out of a personal search, using self-taught techniques, his “Swinging London” period coincided with the “Op-Art Boom” of the 60’s and 70’s; abstract images were commissioned from him to illustrate numerous Penguin editions, accompany When I’m Sixty-Four in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics, and one of the first covers of Time Out Magazine. In 72’, his work was featured in the English Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.
Ragazzini moved back to Italy in the mid-1970’s, continuing his pioneering work in a series of projects and solo exhibitions, while receiving numerous assignments to travel around the world for publications and media sources. For the turn of the 21st century, the MACRO Contemporary Art Museum in Rome held Luci Rosse, centered on his optic alteration of erotic images, put in relation to the “Red Lights” of a darkroom. Recent series’ include Creature and Sculptures from the studio, where Ragazzini plays around with found objects, textures, and surfaces; interior and exterior worlds of his imaginary constituted over a lifetime of experiment, accumulation, travel, excursion, and observation. He is based in Tuscany.
Ragazzini’s work has two facets: the anthropological and the abstract. Anthropological because some of his photographs situate their object in a social context using traditional photographic means, as with his series Waiting for Godot or the Isle of Wight Festival photographs. When they document a material reality, such as in The Tropics Before the Engine project or those of objects at the Museo Guatelli, it is to show how landscapes or objects are shaped by human need, even when taken to inhuman proportion. The abstract puts an object out of context, either by giving it qualities it did not possess beforehand (crumpling an image to give more surface area and shadow, then increasing the contrast to create volume, or the inverse), or fabricating something using entirely “photomecanic” procedures (forms very quickly spun on disks, artificial film plastered over a lens). The two facets can blend, as in La Spiaggia or the Luci Rosse series, where various techniques are used to give images an abstract material quality apart from their evident contexts, with added beauty or significance.
It is life that makes you sick, but life itself can make you heal. The darkroom calmed me, if you can take advantage of it, the most effective medicine is life; it is the beautiful relationship and harmonious relationship with work.
