A Photographer in Sicily

Book excerpt: Enzo Sellerio, distinguished publisher and brilliant but reclusive photographer, has been recording his native Sicily since the Second World War. His considerable achievement is contained in the images within this book. The work is not some attempt at an inclusive compendium of photographs of Sicilian life but the visual harvest gathered from Sellerio's personal experiences of his native land. It is a gallery of passing impressions and fleeting moments given more solid substance by the photographer's pressing of the button on his camera. Among the street scenes and interiors, townscapes and landscapes, people working and at play, the ebb and flow of Sicilian life, the viewer of these photographs begins to recognise a master whose sense of composition has been influenced by the great European painters whose work he knows so well, by Breughel, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Millet. A Photographer in Sicily shows a brilliant visual sensibility at work.