Dal Vero – Cesare Ballardini

‘Dal Vero'(‘From life’) contains 22 photographs that Ballardini took in places just a few kilometers away from each other, towns and villages in the  Emilia Romagna, a region in central-northern Italy, very simple and quiet locations.
Similarly quiet and ordinary are the subjects of Ballardini’s photographs: ploughed fields, service stations, small factories, old cars, country roads.

The photographs were taken between 1985 and 1989, when the author joined, as one of the early members, the cultural association ‘I Figli del Deserto'(The Sons of the Desert’). Founded 1986 in Lugo, the association was joined also by photographers like Olivo Barbieri, Vittore Fossati, Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi.

‘I Figli del Deserto’ had also an equally important literary side. As Gianni Celati observed, in the contemporary era “the desert becomes more and more a path to undertake, the road to be found, the silence to cross in order to be able to still talk to others”. And he added, “the desert is this path: it is the way of silence, the celebration of the small oasis, the discovery of some mythical traces, flashing, blinding, or moving; it is the presence of a flower, of an animal, of a stone, in the indifference of the planetary desert – that is still to be called Nature”.