Angelo Scognamiglio //
Fabio Donato, or The Photographer Who Stepped Onto the Stage
Witness to an Unrepeatable Season
To truly understand Fabio Donato, it is better to begin with a gesture, not with a photograph.
Naples, 1969, Teatro Mediterraneo. The Living Theatre is staging Paradise Now: Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s company, which in those years was dismantling the boundary between stage and audience. Donato is just over twenty, studying Architecture, politically active, and not yet a professional photographer. He enters the theatre, walks down the stairs and then — instead of taking a seat among the audience — does something no stage photographer would do: he steps onto the stage and turns towards the auditorium.
When the actors arrive, they position themselves between him and the audience, then lie down on the floor. Donato does not photograph the performance. He photographs the reversal of the performance: the new relationship between those who look and those who are looked at.
He would recount this many years later, and it remains one of the most important statements for understanding his work. He was not interested in simply documenting the performance, but in “recording this new relationship between the actors and the audience”. Having photographed not the show itself, but the theoretical idea that sustained it — he would later say — was the moment he understood he had become a photographer.
It is worth remembering that physical position: the photographer turned towards the auditorium rather than towards the stage. Because that gesture already contains the whole of his poetics.
Fabio Donato has rarely photographed the object in itself. Almost always, he has photographed the field of relationships that passes through it.
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The exact opposite of silence
Fabio Donato’s photography is born from a radical trust in presence. It does not seek emptiness, does not isolate things until they become motionless emblems, does not remove the human figure in order to let space speak alone. On the contrary: it enters places when they are inhabited, crossed, charged with tension by bodies, voices, gazes, gestures.
His material is co-presence. Bodies, gazes, tensions, artists at work, a theatre audience, the precise moment in which two people share a space and something happens between them.
Donato never photographs only what stands before the lens. He photographs what happens between people, between bodies and space, between the artist and the audience, between the work and the context that brings it to life.
“Taking a photograph is not a technical act. A photograph is a story,” he has said. And it is precisely this narrative idea that makes his gaze so recognisable: the image not as pure recording, but as the telling of a relationship.
His interest is not the abstract eternity of forms, but the present at the very moment it takes shape. Donato pursues what happens before it vanishes: a posture, a conversation, a theatre rehearsal, an encounter, a threshold, a cultural scene at the exact instant in which it manifests itself.
It is no coincidence that Donato came from Architecture. In his images there is always a construction of space, a precise awareness of the internal forces within the frame. Even when he photographs the instant, the instant appears thought through. Nothing has the casual immediacy of a stolen photograph.
For this reason, his shots never give the impression that we have simply “stumbled into” them. They seem, rather, the result of an extremely attentive presence, almost choreographic in nature.
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The witness to an unrepeatable season
The good fortune — and at the same time the risk — of an author such as Donato is that he was in the right place for more than half a century.
His archive, which comprises more than four hundred thousand frames, is one of the great visual diaries of cultural Naples from the 1960s to the 2000s. Almost everything passes through it: theatre, music, the visual arts, the international avant-gardes, a city changing its face.
There is Lucio Amelio and his gallery, the true epicentre of European contemporary art in Southern Italy. There are Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, who met in Naples in 1980 around the idea of that “new creativity of the Mezzogiorno” which, after the earthquake, would flow into the Terrae Motus collection. There are Hermann Nitsch, Vito Acconci, Marcel Marceau, Chet Baker, Pino Daniele, Roberto Benigni.
And then there is theatre.
Eduardo De Filippo, whom Donato followed from 1976 onwards, up to the photograph now displayed in the Naples metro. The first productions by Mario Martone. The young Toni Servillo and Antonio Neiwiller. The experimental Neapolitan theatre of the 1970s and 1980s at the very moment it was coming into being.
But here we must be careful not to make the easiest mistake: reducing Donato to a mere archivist of reality, a fortunate chronicler who “was there”.
That would be unfair and, above all, wrong.
Because the difference between a documentarian and an author does not lie in the event being photographed, but in the way it is seen. And Donato has never looked at an event simply for what it was. He has looked at it for the relational tension running through it.
Exactly as he did that evening on the stage of the Teatro Mediterraneo
Donato himself has often described his work as divided into two parallel paths.
On the one hand, the photographer of artists, theatre, music, the cultural scene. On the other, his more personal images — those he referred to, in a beautiful phrase, as his “poems”.
These include La Città, the long urban research project begun in the 1970s; the journey to India in 1970, from which he returned having photographed not monuments or landscapes, but bare feet; marginal spaces, thresholds, interiors crossed by light.
It would be easy to read these two tracks as separate: the professional and the author, the commissioned photographer and the visual poet.
But the separation is far less clear-cut than it appears.
In both cases, the same idea of photography is at work: not simply stopping what can be seen, but making visible what normally escapes us.
In his portraits of artists, he seeks the moment in which the work takes form. This is why he rarely photographs them posed: what interests him is thought as it happens, not the public image of the artist.
And his urban images do the same with the city. They search for the point of passage between inside and outside, between private and collective, between individual gesture and public space.
For Donato, photography is not used to freeze the world. It is used to reveal the invisible relationships that hold it together.
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A figure still waiting to be truly reread
It must be said honestly: Fabio Donato is an author who has been studied less than he deserves.
There have been exhibitions, catalogues, interviews, archival materials, but there is still no major critical rereading capable of fully placing him within the history of Italian photography in the second half of the twentieth century. And yet few authors have narrated, with comparable continuity, the relationship between art, urban space and cultural life in the Mezzogiorno.
Perhaps also because Donato belongs to a category of photographers who are difficult to simplify.
Too cultured to be reduced to a reporter. Too immersed in events to be merely a conceptual photographer. Too interested in people to take refuge in pure form.
His photography lives precisely on that threshold.
And perhaps that is what makes it feel so contemporary today.
In an age in which the image has become above all self-representation — the continuous display of the self, narcissistic surface, performed identity — Donato represents almost the opposite gesture. A gaze turned towards others, towards the scene, towards the work of others, towards the collective construction of a cultural atmosphere.
He spent his life facing the audience while everyone else was looking at the stage.
And that is precisely why he left us one of the truest portraits of that stage, and of that audience.
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Fabio Donato (Naples, 1947). Photographer, lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples.
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