Mario Dondero

“It should always be clear that photography has never been the main focus of my interest. I am interested in photos as an element of cohesion in human relations, or as a testimony to situations. I am not interested in people for the sake of photographing them, I am interested in them because they exist...” Mario Dondero

Dondero's photography has the ability to be natural, an ability which to all efforts of reflection remains an unreachable myth, tangled up in the meanderings of theoretical reasoning and which he, on the contrary, achieves and embodies. Dondero takes natural photographs, and is able to do so because he is natural. Being natural is thus a way of being and living, not an aesthetic goal: it is a way of looking, approaching, capturing and holding oneself. It is an equilibrium achieved between clarity of vision and conviction of truth. It is a discrete photography that shirks all forms of complacency and places itself totally at the service of the truth of human relationships.
Dondero is kind to the world, puts it at ease and questions it for what it is.
There is no form in his photos; there is – miraculously – only what is there, and which he shows us as he would show us reality.
Dondero, is therefore a genuine realist, indeed a neo-realist, because reality is the only thing he is concerned about and he has no need to emphasise it for us to be able to understand it. If he did emphasise it, the equilibrium would be lost and would not be fulfilled.
Notice what kind of world, what kind of history, what kind of reality, what kind of facts Dondero is conveying to us. His is never a striking gesture, never a climax, it is always something or a moment somewhat by the side. It is the view of someone searching around, looking to the side to get a better view, indeed, to get a view of the “substance”. It is a world in black and white, meant in the most moral sense of the expression, the world of delicacy, of respect, of “natural” light.
 

Mario Dondero, a living legend of photo-journalism and a genuine poet of news reporting, was born in Milan on 6th May 1928 but has Genoese roots. In the immediate postwar years he started working as a journalist with the Avanti! and L'Unità newspapers and later as a photographer with Le Ore magazine. Following in the footsteps of Robert Capa, whom Dondero regards as an unsurpassed master, and of the leading documentary film-maker Joris Ivens, whose friend he later became, his attention focussed immediately on engagée photography. His camera lens has captured, and in several cases immortalized, wars, social and political conflicts and international events, suffice to think of his celebrated shot that was the first to show the fall of the Berlin Wall.