Faggionato Fine Arts are delighted to present
My Right Eye Is Blind, the first show by Italian photographer Donato Paolo Mancini.

At First Sight: The Photographs of Donato Paolo Mancini

It can take a lifetime to find your distinctive voice in photography. To take pictures which are yours alone. But sometimes, as in the case of Donato Paolo Mancini, a photographer seems born with an eye which is tuned already to see things which others don’t, in a way that others might have done but didn’t.

His photographs are poetic understatements. They grow in their impact as you come to know them. At first sight they are familiar, quotidian. Then they unfold like epigrams. They are images which might have passed us by without record or comment, but which once arrested, have the charged potency of melancholy dreams. Seen and trapped by Donato, or sometimes staged, they all have the drama of film-stills. They have the power to unsettle, intrigue, charm, re-assure, provoke and challenge. And they have a way of sticking in the mind like phrases of music, nagging the inner eye.

I am a camera. Those oft-quoted words seem made for Donato. Time, space, depth, height, colour and movement, photography’s six dimensions, are all present in his pictures, defined as they are by light and shadow, drawn by sunlight’s brush, painted by a bedside light or by the flickering wash of television screens. They seem to have come from the most ordinary of mornings, the most straightforward of afternoons. But in a moment of intense perception the ordinary is elevated. One feels that his camera has been with him wherever he goes, all the time, even into his dreams and his unconscious, experimental and questioning, ready to fix and bring back to us these quietly extraordinary photographs.

Patrick Kinmonth
© 2010 Patrick Kinmonth

Donato Paolo Mancini was born in Rome in 1991 and lives between Rome and Berlin.