Interview by Silvia Tarquini
From 3 to 6 September 2026, Gherardo Gossi’s photographic exhibition Rimangono i segni di luce will be on view at the Lazzaretto di Sant’Elia in Cagliari, as part of the Karel Music Expo festival.Installed in the Sala Archi and comprising around fifty images taken over many years, the exhibition grew out of a reflection on light as a trace of memory. The journey begins on the island of San Pietro in Sardinia and with its Colonne, a symbol of a landscape gradually eroded by time, before expanding to photographs taken during travels and film shoots in different places, moving between sun and moon, sea, memories and landscapes: the beach in Tel Aviv, a red moon over Gaza, Montjustin — the Provençal village associated with the later years of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck — and finally New York, with an image chosen as a symbol of hope and fraternity. The photographs were post-produced by Claudio Palmisano.
Rimangono i segni di luce will be open on Thursday 3 September from 8 pm for Karel Music Expo audiences; on Friday 4, Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 September from 9 am to 1 pm and from 3 to 7 pm, with free admission; and on Friday and Saturday from 8 pm for festival audiences.
This project began last year in Carloforte and has continued and expanded this year in Cagliari. Can you tell us how the idea for the exhibition developed?
The initial core of the project is what I exhibited in Carloforte. This year, Karel Music Expo gave me the opportunity to develop it into a broader version, adding new images and connecting them to the Moon, the theme of the festival. I was very pleased to receive the invitation, as it gave me the chance to expand a project that had originally grown out of encouragement from friends and family to exhibit my photographs.
Can you tell us something about the title?
‘Rimangono i segni di luce’ — because memory, my own memory, carries these traces with it too.
The exhibition brings together photographs taken many years apart, intertwining the theme of memory with the writing of Sergio Atzeni and the idea of the symbol, embodied by the Colonne on the island of San Pietro. How did you structure the exhibition?
There are several sections, each connected to the places depicted and to different ideas and associations. The exhibition grew out of my relationship with light, inspired by reading Sergio Atzeni’s Passavamo sulla terra leggeri, which ends with a reference to the island of San Pietro, where I spend my summers.
In the sea off the island are the ‘Colonne’. Originally there were two; now only one remains, but they continue to be the symbol of the island. Over the years, I have explored our need to create symbols for ourselves. This small island off the coast of Sardinia found its symbol in the Colonne, and takes great pride in them.
I continued to photograph them over the years, recording different stages in their transformation while also exploring the ways in which they were represented. As time passed, the Colonne gradually eroded. I documented this process: the physical crumbling of a symbol.
The first section of the exhibition grew out of this theme. It opens with an image of what remains of the Colonne today, followed by around twenty postcard-sized photographs taken over the years: images of the place, portraits, events and different moments in time. It is somewhere everyone who comes to the island immediately wants to visit.
The section ends with an actual postcard of the island, naturally featuring the Colonne. After all, my photographs are postcards too, telling the story of that place.
When does an image become a ‘postcard’?
It becomes a ‘postcard’ precisely when it becomes the symbol of a place: the Colosseum for Rome, the Duomo for Milan, the Mole Antonelliana for Turin. I was interested in exploring how even a small place needs to find its own symbolic image, which is then reproduced in countless different ways.
The exhibition includes photographs of plates decorated with images of the Colonne, as well as a photograph of a book featuring an image of them taken by the Alinari in the early years of the last century. It is a way for a community to identify collectively with a place, and on San Pietro this has been happening for more than a hundred years.
So does the exhibition also include images taken by other photographers?
All the photographs are my own. Two of them incorporate historical images in their settings, telling the story of a symbol. Every time I return to the island, I am drawn back to that place and photograph it again, struck by the erosion caused by time and the sea. For this first section of the exhibition, I selected around twenty of the most significant images.
Other ‘themes’, as the introductory text explains, are the moon, the sun and the sea, as a surface that catches light and creates strong contrasts.
Yes, the work moves beyond the idea of the symbol towards images connected with the sun and the moon, some of them taken during my work trips and inspired by the places I encounter in Italy and around the world. My approach to photography almost always begins with an emotion triggered by light.
I selected a number of images in which either direct sunlight or reflected moonlight plays a particular role. There are photographs taken in Iceland, Essaouira in Morocco, Stromboli and other places. What connects them is the way light influences our emotions. That, ultimately, is what the work is about.
There are also some still lifes that I called Lune d’argento [Silver Moons]: photographs of moon-shaped rings that I took several years ago.
Finally, one of the concluding sections includes a panel in which I have placed an image of a beach in Tel Aviv alongside that of a red moon: The Bloodied Moon of Gaza. I wanted to bring the two together to introduce the theme of Palestinian suffering, which is very close to my heart.
There is also a small tribute to Cartier-Bresson, connected with Montjustin. Can you tell us about this place?
It is a village in Provence where Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck spent their final years and where they are buried. In this brief journey, which reflects my passion for photography, it seemed only right to include a tribute to a master from whom I learnt a great deal.
It is not a tribute to his photography: these are not images ‘in the style of Cartier-Bresson’. They are photographs I took in the village where he and Martine spent their final years.
How does the exhibition conclude?
The exhibition concludes with a very large print, measuring approximately one metre by one metre sixty: two smiling young men in New York, one wearing a black sweatshirt and the other a white one. The Black young man is smiling — an image of hope, which felt right for the end of the exhibition.
After the stark contrast between the moon over Gaza and the sun of Tel Aviv, I wanted to end with an image that would encourage us to look towards the future with hope. The photograph is accompanied by another line from Atzeni: ‘As long as our bodies are breathing, we can still embrace one another.’
Would you like to say something about the techniques you used? Last year, you told me that you had taken a number of very different approaches.
As this is not a single, unified body of work but a journey spanning fifteen years, perhaps even longer, the technologies I used are inevitably very different. I selected the images primarily according to their themes rather than the techniques involved.
The ‘oldest’ photograph is the one used for the exhibition poster. I took it many years ago in Paris with a very early-generation mobile phone: a young woman on the phone, with the reflection of a warm light behind her outlining her figure. It is a fragmented image, almost dissolving, as though it were disintegrating. But that was the result I was looking for, and that is why I am particularly attached to this photograph.
It is an image that encapsulates the title, Rimangono i segni di luce. It is not an image that reveals itself immediately; you almost have to search for it. But within it lies the journey of this entire body of work.
The first image in the exhibition, on the other hand, was taken with a Leica: one of the Colonne, overexposed and out of focus, immersed in a white sea beneath a white sky. A symbol dissolving.
The postcard sequences were created using very different tools: mainly mobile phones, but also cameras, in some cases analogue. There are also photographs taken with Olympus cameras or the latest-generation mobile phones. Those taken in Stromboli, for example, date from the period when I was working on the film… Arsa by the artist duo Masbedo. Over the years, although I have always been very passionate about technology, technology itself has become less central to my work. It has become a tool in the service of the story. Today, I am more interested in working with ideas and in what I can bring to an image through my own way of seeing the world.
Naturally, I pay great attention to colour correction. In this case, I worked with… Claudio Palmisanoa colourist I have been working with for some time and whose input I really value. When I can find him, that is! He is also a great enthusiast of underwater photography and often disappears beneath the surface.
I also pay close attention to the printing stage. I want the final result to correspond as closely as possible to what I had imagined.
Is the post-production stage a creative part of the process?
There is post-production. In some cases it plays a greater role, in others a lesser one, but it is always there to serve the idea behind the story.
How did your love of photography begin, and how does it intertwine with your work in cinema?
I started as a teenager, working in black and white and making my first prints at home. My passion for filmmaking actually grew out of my passion for photography. At the time, photography was one of the few tools available to a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old who wanted to create images and tell the story of his own time, his passions, music, concerts and demonstrations.
I had a small darkroom in the attic at home, where I used to develop and print photographs with my friend Roberto Forza, who is also a cinematographer and now a fellow member of Chiaroscuro. We grew up sharing this passion.
My path eventually led me towards cinema, but I never lost my love of photography. It is only now, after a lot of encouragement, that I have decided to show part of my archive.
The exhibition also tells the story of that passage of time. There are very recent photographs, taken in Solda, South Tyrol, while I was working on Daniele Vicari’s latest film, Bianco, last winter, alongside much older ones, such as the photograph I took in Paris on a bateau-mouche. I still remember that series of photographs. What struck me was that everyone on the boat was busy taking pictures rather than looking at what was actually in front of them.
There is something of your own life in this exhibition.
Yes, of course. Not all of it, naturally, but certain moments. There is a thread running through the work: light, the sea, the sea as a bearer of light both by day and by night, and therefore the sun and the moon.
There are places associated with holidays and the memories connected to them, play, images of young people on the beach, a photograph of Coney Island with a large Ferris wheel. It is a diverse collection, but the thread running through it remains light and the way it accompanies places, memories and images.
Thank you, Gherardo.
