Translator: Reviewer: Michele Gianella
Here in Hamam al-Alil
providing fires and support of the Iraqi forces
who are fighting to liberate Mosul from ISIS.
On the front line
A rocket just came in.
A rocket landed on the -
The dead man is right here, but pretend not to -
My name is Gabriele Micalizzi,
and I'm a photojournalist.
I do a complicated job.
I was born in Milan,
but I have very southern origins.
I started my career
because I had a predisposition, a very strong passion
for the visual arts.
I began with graffiti, then tattoos,
and then I arrived to photography and video.
I grew up not far from here,
at Via Rizzoli 31, Cascina Gobba,
a very hard place in the '90s.
Elders played dice in gambling dens.
Instead, we boys were going to fight
with those who didn't belong to the block.
My first real experience in war was in Afghanistan.
I was 23 years old, and I didn't know anything about Afghanistan.
I was "embedded" with both the Italian and French army.
I thought it'd be like the movies,
like Apocalypse Now:
explosions everywhere,
seeing people die in torment
in the trenches.
But I didn't see any of that.
I spent a lot of time walking around with soldiers,
going to meet the tribal chiefs,
to visit hospitals that they had built.
But there I understood why, talking about balance,
even the soldiers, to stay there,
needed to build relationships,
and then to do something for the population.
So, to maintain balance,
we all have to compromise.
I was walking,
and a soldier in the field pointed the rifle out of the blue.
So I stood in front of him.
After the third photo, he started making this gesture to me,
but I didn't get it.
I wondered: why does he do that?
"Hold still, I have to take your picture."
He says, "There are mines. Go back, there are mines."
So that was the first thing I learned.
Indeed, you learn this job in the field:
there are no books, no courses, none of this.
You have to try.
A few years later I found myself in Thailand
to cover the revolution of the Red Shirts
in Bangkok.
There I had my baptism of fire.
I got my first grenade, very close.
This grenade exploded
in a thunder that really tore apart the streets.
And a young guy fell on me.
He was bleeding.
I laid him on the ground, I saw it wasn't serious,
and I photographed him,
despite all the whirlwind of emotions coming over me.
And then I realized that I could do this job.
It was right for me.
Think of war as a theater
where everyone has their own scene, role,
their own lines.
Think of the war painters before us, before the photojournalists.
Everyone has this role that he must respect.
The military uses this term
when they talk about areas of conflict: the theater.
In fact, it seems like a great stage.
The photojournalist there tries to tell
by moving in this capillary web of contacts.
He only has one weapon: his camera.
His bullets are his skills, his war experience,
albeit indirect.
And it's normal,
for it's not that you go to war:
we hear of it from others.
They tell us about the war.
But I can tell you first hand one thing:
war scenarios involve a lot of risk.
Indirect experiences that we have at war, in fact,
subsequently lead us, reporters, to tell,
when we go there, in turn, to bring stories to you,
they make us belong, get attached to these stories.
We live with these people, they become our friends,
they become everything to us, because it's a thing
that we can't forget, when we go back home.
"I wonder how he is. What's that family doing?
And what about that story I followed?"
That's because human emotions accelerate in war,
friendships get cemented,
and solidarity becomes everybody's priority.
But I must also admit that war is very, very photogenic.
We try to tell, in fact,
the normal stories of these people
and the consequences of the conflict,
these people that have to do anything
to protect their family and find a piece of bread,
or retrieve gasoline to move.
But today, with the bulimia of social media,
everything gets grinded.
Even our photos end up there in this scrolling
and get lost.
There's no time to absorb anything.
Cinema created myths, created icons.
Think about the movies:
"Full Metal Jacket," "Black Hawk Down," and "Platoon."
Now think about the myths that came out of it,
the reference figures:
Colonel Kurtz, Sergeant Hartman,
or Rambo.
How many people have we seen in Libya
with the X double row of bullets, like Rambo?
So at some point,
cinema and reality have lost their balance.
Reality used to influence cinema.
But at some point cinema influenced reality.
So the balance has shifted.
Think about TV: what did TV create?
The aesthetic consciousness of people.
Imagine if, in the '70s,
any soldier would've gone to complain
for the publication of a cover of "Time" or "Life"
where his shirt was in bad shape.
Today, warriors post their own photos
and want to be treated as influencers.
They want to look cool, and they want the photos retouched.
Let's take all this as an anthropological phenomenon.
Everything changes - the world changes, and the way of telling war changes.
We're all involved, and none of us can feel acquitted.
It's a scale where the balance is on an inclined plane.
We try to be invisible when telling our stories.
We forget ourselves, we have to go unnoticed.
And all this is in contrast
with what's going on today, right?
Instagram! In this world, everyone is a protagonist
but doesn't have a damn thing to say.
But we always think of war as far away.
War always happens somewhere else. When we say "war",
it's about something that'll never touch us.
But actually COVID made all of us realize
that fear can get very close
and what happens there can come here.
As we try to survive
and tell human madness with our work anyway
we still must control our emotions,
because that's the secret: controlling emotions.
Even when you see sacks full of pieces of children.
Why am I telling you this?
Because I'm a father, I have 2 daughters.
And when I photograph in Gaza,
I photographed this father with his daughter in his lap.
Obviously, there was an unbridgeable void inside of me.
There was a strong emotion.
There was a sense of hate, of disgust for this society.
But we actually do this:
we're storytellers, vehicles.
Because in the end, man is as brutal as nature.
Nature is brutal, but we don't judge her.
We think that we can change the world with photos.
But it's not true.
We just need to do one thing:
accept it.
So what happens a thousand kilometers away
can actually strike us?
Can actually reach us here?
Can actually influence us?
Yes.
So when balance is missing in a war,
there are empty spaces that must be filled.
And war is a very big social elevator.
For example, I met and photographed Givi,
a 35-year-old worker at a sling rope factory
who then became the great leader of the Somalia Battalion,
that completely destroyed Donetsk Airport
and drove out the Ukrainian enemy.
Or I also met Khalifa Haftar,
who had been abandoned by Colonel Gaddafi
after the war in Chad,
and thrown into prison.
The CIA fished him out and recycled him
to use him, now, in a limelight
that still goes on today in Libya.
When government crises occur,
good or bad, the state must look for
keeping a minimum basic sovereignty,
so borders must be preserved,
hospitals have to work - sometimes.
But the law begins to falter,
corruption is rampant
chains loosen,
so pure anarchy rises.
It's in this dark looseness that I move to tell.
But let's also talk a little about money.
It takes a lot of money to shoot in a war,
to tell and go see the stories,
to find them, and to move through.
And even the involved people need a lot of money.
It takes a lot of cash.
Because when a country is at war its currency is devalued.
All business is created in that moment.
There's a lot of business.
There's no better place in the world than war to do business.
Everything becomes business: food, gasoline, as we said,
or bribery, relating to documents, rides, etc.
When I was in Baghuz, before they hurt me,
I was following, in fact, the situation in the last pocket of ISIS,
and I'd heard about this story, basically, of those
who wanted to escape from this Islamic, ghost State,
bought a ride from smugglers.
The smugglers took you
for a fee of 1,000 euros per person,
and brought you toward Turkey.
But in reality, as soon as they came out
from the borders of the Islamic state,
they took you to Americans and Kurds.
So double payment.
Damn, this is creative business, isn't it?
So today we use people's lives,
but we've always used them.
That's war, isn't it?
Greed trumping on everything else.
So those who need to change the balance
put a coin on the scale and no longer an ideology.
There are many ways to tell a story,
many different angles and facets
such as places and spaces.
No matter where, e.g. in the Middle East,
we try to follow a method to tell our stories
and it's by method that I learned going around the world.
Now I'm following a story here in Milan,
right on Via della Moscova.
A dilapidated barracks is the headquarters
of the homicide squad's investigative unit.
This team has an incredible ranking:
100% of murders solved.
Some cold cases are still to be solved,
but still an awesome ranking, the best in Italy and Europe.
I followed the Alves case.
The Alves case is a heinous murder:
83 stabs to a Brazilian transsexual.
That's when I realized that regardless, even in Milan -
despite I already knew it -
I realized that crime, in any case, is fluid in Milan.
It moves,
it follows a little and intertwines with this marching economy.
We see a glossy Milan with its illuminated skyscrapers.
In reality, Milan transforms at night.
It transforms.
It leaves the Navigli, the tram, and the aperitif behind.
It turns into the murder of Via Plana.
This territory that we try to explore,
which is as far away as war
or as close as the city, which is here:
our city, my city.
In the end, I try to enter
the meanders of the human psyche
and make sense of this balance between madness and lucidity.
We have different experiences
and probably, sometimes, we think that our shared routines
are normal, irrelevant.
But we can all learn one thing,
and we have a duty to do so:
understand the difference between good and evil.
So this story of mine can do two things:
scare you or teach you something, as it's taught me.
Speaking of balances,
I would say that the balance is on an inclined plane.
The choice to understand or ignore
is up to you.
Thank you.