PHOTOBOOKS: MACONDO BY FAUSTO GIACCONE
Have you ever read a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez?
What if I told you that a photographer has turned the settings of his stories into a photography book?
Welcome to this new edition of my favorite photo books. Today, I will talk to you about Macondo by Fausto Giaccone.
Fausto Giaccone is an Italian photographer, born in 1943 in Tuscany and raised in Palermo, later moving to Rome and then Milan. He graduated in architecture and has worked as a freelance photographer since he was young. The lack of a sense of belonging to a place led him to feel an inner emptiness. This emptiness would be filled with photography of the places and stories of others. In his photos, he never gives in to dramatizing his subjects but focuses on their dignity and humanity, showing a real and deep personal involvement in his reports. He covered key events of the 1968 Italian protests and then traveled the world as a photojournalist, exploring social issues, landscapes, and architecture.
Since he was young, he became passionate about the books of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. By chance and good luck, he visited Colombia several times, until 2006, when he decided to create a photographic narrative of the books he had loved so much. He traveled until 2010, carrying a Rolleiflex camera around his neck, taking pictures exclusively in black and white.
In 2013, with the publisher Postcard, he released Macondo. This book, 128 pages long, focuses on the Caribbean Colombia, tracing the places and stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's characters. The book is hardcover, 28x28 cm, and contains only black-and-white photos. Inside, there are texts by Gerald Martin (biographer of the writer), Giovanni Chiaramonte (historian of photography), and the story by Giaccone himself.
Macondo, the town in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is an imaginary place, but not too much. It was the real name of a Banana’s plantation near Aracataca, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's hometown. Macondo is not only the town of One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is Caribbean Colombia, is La Costa.
In both the writer's books and Giaccone's photos, we find many versions of Macondo, all pointing to a single place, imaginary yet real and vivid. The photos are human, democratic. The photographer doesn’t shoot for himself but for the people of these places, for the people who live in and with them. Small towns in the middle of nowhere.
The book retraces Giaccone’s travels in Colombia, following the steps of Marquez’s characters. The order of the photographic narrative itself is based on the settings of the writer’s novels. Short quotes from his books, linked to the photos that recall them, take us into an unknown, fantastic, yet real country.
In the pages of this book, we find stories of people who inhabit those Caribbean places, often economically poor but rich in spirit, strong and dignified people. Fausto Giaccone tells us about their everyday lives, never simplifying their misery, in fact, avoiding any sense of superiority. Steering clear of post-colonialism and underdevelopment themes, he offers a story about the beauty of the ordinary, the everyday. A story that brings us back to the lines of Marquez.
The book is in English, but at the end, there is an insert with all the texts in Italian and a map of the photographed locations.
It is a great example of how reality and fiction can mix harmoniously in the complex game of memory. After reading this book several times, you feel connected to these places, almost as if they were distant cousins with whom we have much in common. We also become an inhabitant of Macondo.
On my YouTube channel, you will find videos about the books I talk about in this blog.
The book is available here: Postcard/Macondo.
