Jazz Rebounds: Photography in Italy during the pandemic

I am a photographer, living close to Bergamo in Italy. Jazz is my passion and I love shooting during concerts and performances, and everything that comes with that.

[Ed note: Luciano Rossetti’s photo of Riccardo Pittau and Gli Amici di Matteo, below, received the Photo of the Year Award in the 2021 JJA Jazz Awards]

I like the magic of the photos that come out of the dark stages, the backstage, the rehearsals. I love the cracking of the parquet stage.

To take photographs of jazz musicians is amazing and photographing in Italy is even better because very often festivals take place in unbelievable locations such as historical and archeological sites, buildings thousands of years old.

The final months of 2019 and the first few of 2020 were a great period for me, with many interesting things happening. In November 2019, as a challenge for my 60th birthday, I chose to run the New York Marathon, my very first.

At the same time, I was assigned by ECM Records as official photographer for the label’s 50th anniversary, celebrated at the Lincoln Center –  two evenings of music with the greatest of its musicians. At the end of January, I was in Paris for the Sons d’Hiver (Sounds of Winter) festival. I also had an assignment to the Elbphilharmonie Theatre in Hamburg for ‘Reflektor Manfred Eicher.’

However, in Italy we heard the news about a strange virus from China. We did not really understand what it meant. Soon though — in mid February 2020 — the COVID-19 pandemic emerged less than half a mile from my home, in the Alzano Lombardo hospital. Initially, it was a few cases of a new pneumonia that doctors were not familiar with. The hospital closed but only for a few hours as a precaution.

Perhaps due to not understanding this illness or underestimating its importance, disease spread. The local tribunal began an investigation, but that didn’t change the fact that the impact on our lives was profound and dramatic.

The Bergamo area had the world’s highest percentage of deaths per capita. Fear ruled our lives, and I cannot forget the sinking feeling that fear brought to us during March and April. I was afraid of going out to walk the dog, let alone go to the market once a week. Silence was the soundtrack of those months, broken only by the sirens of countless ambulances. It was very distressing.

The pandemic had struck at one of the best times of my photographic life, a period of great creative activity and satisfaction.  At the beginning of March 2020 I was supposed to go to Austria, to the Artacts Festival in St. Johann in Tirol for the opening of a collective exhibition which included my photographs. It was a great honor that they used one of my images for the poster. But the borders were suddenly closed.

Also, I had organized a personal exhibition to celebrate the music photographer/recording engineer Jimmy Katz for the Bergamo Jazz Festival for the end of March (through my Phocus Agency I am his Italian representative). The event was cancelled; no festival, no Jimmy Katz exhibition.

Before the pandemic, photographing had been a real pleasure. Besides my commissions and outfield assignments, I worked for a daily magazine, which meant I might run from a theater show to a jazz concert at a gallery opening to a classical music performance. With no live concerts, no theater performances, all I could say was, “I used to travel around Italy and abroad to attend jazz and theater festivals, but all this ended at the beginning of March 2020. I approximate that I missed about 100 concerts.

During the summer things improved a little. For a couple of months, it was almost normal, and we deluded ourselves thinking pandemic would soon be over.

Last August, I was in Sardinia where two festivals took place: Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz was held in Sant’Anna Arresi in the south of the island and Isole che parlano at locations in Palau, Arzachena and Lugosanto in the north.

But even during this period, normality was relative. To get to a concert, one had to book online, provide contact-tracing data, and undergo temperature checks at designated locations set up before the entrance at music venues. Once inside, one could not move from the assigned seats; hand sanitation had to be done several times during the evening, and a mandatory distance was enforced between people. There was an obligation to wear masks outdoors as well as inside. It was like a “normal Orwell 1984” scenario.

When summer was over, the situation dramatically deteriorated, and extensive lockdowns were imposed again. The situation has not changed much since then. The whole show business world stopped, and we are all still stuck at home. It will probably stay that way until most of us are vaccinated.

Most people working in the Italian entertainment industry (and elsewhere) have been out of work for more than a year, are in serious economic difficulties and are psychologically exhausted. A limited number of events are taking place, but these shows and concerts are organized in theaters without an audience. Art exhibitions are viewable only online. Gallery openings and various meetings are organized via streaming.

My newspaper work has been reduced to taking a very few photographs off a computer screen. I don’t know how best to express a photographer’s frustration having to photograph a computer screen, but you can imagine.

For a silver lining, the only upside has been that during lockdowns we have had a lot of time to do things that we had previously put off focusing on.

I took this period as an opportunity to organize my analogue archive, which includes tens of thousands of negatives. I’ve started researching, scanning, and arranging a photo history, which I had started in the late ’70s. I began posting some of the best shots on my Instagram account.

It was incredible to review photos I took more than 20 years ago, never printed and used.

One stands out: a John Lewis piano solo in the wonderful Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza from 1998. The theatre was designed by Palladio in 1500 and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I am also thinking about books to publish when things improve.

I find comfort in knowing that I’m not alone in this, and that – all things considered – I have been luckier than many, especially here in my region. This phase has been rough but my hope to soon be able to attend a live concert remains unshaken. The Bergamo Jazz Festival is scheduled to occur from September 16 to 19, 2021.