By Nino Giaramidaro

Photographer is an umbrella word. Playing with words we could say it covers lots of “things”, not necessarily qualities but also defects, vices, deformations, exaggerations and other words ending in “tions” ,whose roots are unknown, but whose mysteries make up Aldo Belvedere.

Aldo Belvedere does everything in a rush, he always has a surprise in his bag, a little book – why not a little sketchbook, a collection, a handful of photos, some prints? – is always astonishing, with no rules but with various spinning influences.

He’s always busy, takes dark rooms and studios apart and then puts them back together, succeeds in finding the way to make an old lens work with a new camera and takes beautiful pictures having that special something hard to find nowadays: his own incisiveness, his personal touch, his details which distinguish ruthless originality from imitations, from true copies and facsimiles.

Aldo Belvedere barricades himself in a dark room to extract the photo he’s taken from the negative film which is unwilling to give it back.

Or he walks uphills for kilometres, breathless, his heart thumping, because the shot is imprisoned in those heights among discouraging slopes; places for stubborn men, for those who are still searching for something which most likely nobody cares about: an unknown emotion, old fashioned, irreducible to a uniform affected trend.

From the manual focusing 35 millimetres Pentax to a Fatif optical bench modular camera, from a 2.8 F Rolleiflex to a 10 megapixel K D (Pentax) in a fil rouge of colourful wonderful things with no connection to each other.

Aldo Belvedere can move from the rush of the 5 photograms taken in a second to the slowness of the 10x12 filmholder. With the simplicity coming from an old fashioned knowledge, with its old Magnifiers, frame counter, trays and small bottles, drums and other developing devices and the beautiful negative films proud of their spectrum of colours, now laboriously “ translated” into a dynamic range.

In other words, it’s enough to see his photos.