2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland
In 1981, an Italian publisher commissioned me to produce a series of photographs illustrating Goethe’s Journey to Sicily – a trip which took place 250 years ago. The project suited both my interest in literature and my obsession with time and timelessness. I found objects and places that looked exactly as Goethe describes them, and I photographed them in black and white, very much as I had seen them in the engravings of a leather-bound collection of Goethe’s works, that had belonged to my maternal grandmother and that I had often leafed through as a child. I fitted my Nikon with a ‘perspective control’ wide-angle lens, whose effect reminded me of Goethe’s characteristic way of paying attention to details, while never losing sight of the whole. In a similar way, this type of lens allows the photographer to cover a wide field, while keeping all the details in focus and making the vertical lines appear parallel (which was also the way in which Renaissance painters interpreted reality – though not quite the way it is seen by the human eye, nor by a regular camera).
1981, Palermo, Sicily, Italy, the statue of Santa Rosalia