«I can feel the parts of the engine and understand what's wrong with the motors just by listening to their sounds. That helps me do good work.» We're in Trinidad, Cuba, 2016. A mechanic smiles over the hood of a parked car, lined with trees. Besides his work clothes, the man wears dark glasses—protection not just from the sun. His right arm rests on a white cane.
Kampong Cham, Cambodia, 2016. Here, a mother and son sit on the floor, probably in their home. The woman holds her child, who has a disability, her gaze steady—full of dignity and awareness—fixed on the camera. "My son will grow up at home, in his community," she says.
«Every day I go out to sea.» A man in Manzanillo, Cuba again in 2016, sits in a boat preparing to fish. He's lost in thought, maybe thinking about the day's catch or the young people in his village, traditions slowly crumbling under the weight of advancing modernity. The man, in a white shirt and striped shorts, has one arm. He calls to mind Hemingway's fisherman.
These are three of the stories that emerge from ninety black-and-white photographs—each accompanied by a caption—taken by Christian Tasso and collected in his book Nessuno escluso (Rome, Contrasto, 2021). It's the fruit of an artistic project that began in 2009, and it approaches disability without stereotypes, without sentimentality, without pretense or decoration.
This award-winning photographer travels the world—Italy, Ecuador, Romania, Nepal, Germany, Albania, Cuba, Mongolia, India, Iceland, Switzerland, Kenya, Cambodia—and meets men, women, children, and elderly people living with different forms of disability. Disability shapes their identity, yes, but it does not consume it. His powerful photographs show this clearly. His subjects go about their daily lives, pursue their ambitions, and above all participate in their communities. Tasso himself explains: «With my work, I wanted to challenge the lazy way we see things. When we talk about disability, we all focus on the traits that make the person we're looking at "different." But I did the opposite—without forcing it, without denying anything, but keeping the focus on the truth: the person, front and center. Each person with their own qualities, and each one valued for the chance to show us who they are, far from the stereotypes that so often become filters we can't escape.»
Flipping through this beautiful book, you meet a boy in a wheelchair in Kenya, laughing surrounded by his many friends. You see a young couple from Nepal—she pregnant with their first child in 2015, he using a white cane, seeming to carry the memory of the earthquake that destroyed their home, yet not losing hope. There's a blind man working behind the bar in Albania, serving beer to customers. People on horseback. People kissing or embracing a friend or family member. «Active individuals» who, through the particularities of their lives, enrich and honor the world around them.
Through Tasso's photographs, we hear from a humanity that radiates pride in its gaze and posture. People «aware—as Alessandra Mauro writes in the book's introduction—of who they are and what their body is» and who seem to say to the photographer, and to us watching from a distance, «Look at me. This is who I am. Here. Now.» There is nothing to be ashamed of. There is no war happening with the body. A gallery where no one is left out—«where each person will have their place in the community»—«seen by eyes that know how to look» with respect and empathy. And «everyone chose freely how and where to be photographed.»
The photographs are prefaced by a reflection from Giuseppe Pontiggia (from his book Nati due volte), and fourteen of the images in the volume are made accessible to blind and low-vision people with audio description and soundscapes. Simplified text is available on www.contrastobooks.com to support people of all ages with language or cognitive difficulties. This is essential work.