Boulez: “In music I am as important as the Pope.” V. Ca. · Corriere della Sera, 1996.
Looking at his photograph, a close-up with a symphony’s dense breath, Pierre Boulez commented: “Yes, it is ironic. I give you my blessing.” “But I come from the Pope’s city,” photographer Marco Delogu joked. Boulez replied: “In music I am as important as the Pope.”
Delogu, thirty-six, Roman and successful, is an Italian in Paris. On 13 June he opens an IRCAM exhibition of photographs of leading composers of our time. “Boulez and his staff made the selection. Like all great figures, he wanted his rivals, from Iannis Xenakis to Hugues Dufourt.”
Composers dislike portraits. Only recently have some younger figures tried to restore interrupted dialogue with audiences. A gaze communicates: perhaps art photography can continue or begin that conversation. IRCAM persuaded them, and immediate Polaroid results reassured them: sophisticated large-format equipment wrongly associated with amateurs.
Xenakis fascinated Delogu. No problem arose over the half-face devastated by an explosive. At the composer’s Paris home, an old dance school in Pigalle, they spoke less about his fascinating, disorderly artistic development than his fully lived life: Romanian communist-party membership, clandestinity and a death sentence as a deserter from Axis occupation forces.
One of the youngest subjects, François Paris, said his half-lit, half-shadowed portrait most faithfully represented his music. “I seek the essential trait,” Delogu explains: a concise essence of personality or its dominant aspect. Boulez’s irony; Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s elusive intensity and longing for “elsewhere”.
Photographing Milanese Jacopo Baboni Schilingi—the Italian selection also includes Ivan Fedele, Marco Stroppa and Fausto Romitelli—Delogu sought to emphasise ancient features, a strongly Italian face recalling Pontormo’s paintings.
Philippe Hurel, a Villa Medici fellow from 1987 to 1989, introduced him to IRCAM. They met at an exhibition on Venetian farmers in the 1930s during the Pontine Marshes’ reclamation. In London Delogu showed a retrospective of ancient Roman emperors’ and philosophers’ busts. “I accepted the composers project because I like working with groups, immersing myself among people sharing experiences.”
Captions: portraits opening at IRCAM on 13 June, including Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, Kaija Saariaho, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez. Other Italian musicians include Fedele, Stroppa and Romitelli.