A vase with relief figures, a small old tureen and three cloth roses are the objects which kept me busy last year. I photographed them using natural light, front-on in one to one scale using a large format camera (20 x 25), in black-and-white and contact-printed. The object is mirrored in the lens, which in turn fixes the object. The exposure times under these conditions are very long, sometimes even minutes. The room is immersed in silence, everything is still, to allow the sheet absorb the reversed image transmitted by the object as precisely as possible. This ritual is repeated identically several times over a period of a few months. At the end, I place the slowly accumulated photos side by side and I compare the subtle differences which photography has recorded between one shot and another. The subject is merely a pretext. What is most important for me in photography is doing photography. And like the art of tea, photography must also be “practiced with great devotion but also great detachment.” 1983 - Franco Vimercati

Franco Vimercati was born in Milan in 1940. By the time of his death in 2001, he only exhibited in a few select locations in Turin, Milan, Modena and Verona. Vimercati is a careful photographer, who during almost forty years of work chose to represent just a few objects which are part of our daily lives: bottles of mineral water, parquet, an iron, a tin can, a glass, a bottle, a dish. All simple objects which, however constitute the basis for a deep reflection on the meaning of vision and perception and above all on the meaning of the photographic gesture. He is not searching for reality through the camera, but rather into photography which uses elements taken from reality. The photographed objects are immersed in silence and immobility, time is a dominating presence which can be felt in his pictures, which not by chance are taken with long exposures and large studio cameras.

In 1973 he dedicated his work to portraits, published in the book Sulle Langhe, which gives a conscious documentation about the people and places of that reality, but which also represents a stimulus to think about the meaning of photographic investigation and the way in which the camera is used for that purpose. In 1975 his research focused on a series of thirty six shorts for a Bottiglia di acqua minerale: once again the meaning is not so much that of the represented object, but rather the use the artist makes of his instrument, the “camera”. These long exposures, this careful reading which the spectator is forced to make as well as the clarity of the object also appear in the Zuppiera cycle, which was realized in over nine years (1983-1992).

His last works, from 1995, show the inverted images as they are given by the camera, but not even in this works , does he give up black and white printing, carried out with masterful technique. Among the personal exhibitions we may mention: the Civic Gallery of Modern Art, Modena (1975), Martano Gallery, Turin (1976, 1991), Raffaella Cortese Gallery, Milan (1995), Monica de Cardenas Gallery, Milan (1997), Elisabeth Kaufmann Gallery, Basel (1998), San Fedele Arte, Milan (2002), Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese (2008).