My Life in Focus

by Gianni Bozzacchi,Joey Tayler

  My best friends were Sergio “the Blondie” and Gaetano, known as Tano. We were inseparable. On more than one occasion we ran away from home together to avoid being punished by our parents. We’d go to the rail depot and sleep in the empty wagons. One night our wagon started moving while we were asleep. We woke in a panic and leapt off before the whole train left.

  One day, when I was fourteen or fifteen, Sergio suggested we go up to Via Veneto and take photos of people. I didn’t think twice. Without asking permission, I took my father’s Rolleicord, leapt onto a Vespa with Sergio, and off we went.

  Sergio and I started going regularly to Via Veneto just to look at the people, to be able to say we were there when Kirk Douglas arrived in his Ferrari, or when Sophia Loren passed by. Nothing special ever happened on our own street, an anonymous residential block just like a thousand others in Rome. Via Veneto was another planet, a glittering world of smart cafes, fashion boutiques, and luxury hotels, peopled by those who moved in the most elegant social circles. Before too long, Federico Fellini would immortalize the place and its moment in his classic movie La Dolce Vita, and the street now has a square named after the master.

  That first day, Sergio and I saw the famous British actor Edmund Purdom coming out of a cafe with a woman on his arm. As they paused to say good-bye he kissed her, and I snapped a photo. The woman told me she wanted a copy of the photo and gave me her name and address. Her name was Anna Magnani. I went home so happy that I told my father the whole story, even knowing that I’d get in trouble for having risked his Rolleicord on a Vespa. He used the camera, he’d explain, but it wasn’t his—it belonged to the state. The next day, however, he let me come to his darkroom to develop and print my photo.

  My father’s prized Rolleicord, the camera I “borrowed” for my first teenage forays along Rome’s already famous Via Veneto. (Photo by M&S Materiale fotografico.)

  I made a contact and was both surprised and disappointed. The image I’d wanted, the one I’d seen with my own eye, just wasn’t there. I had no idea what I’d done wrong. The only thing I could do—I thought—was to tell Magnani to her face. I got to her place, rang the bell, and took an elevator to the top floor, sweating all the way. Magnani’s son, Luca, a kid my own age who walked on crutches, opened the door. I didn’t have time to explain what I was doing there before Magnani herself appeared, wearing little more than a flimsy dressing gown. I’ll remember her legs until my dying day. I was a bundle of nerves. I could see her whole body silhouetted against the light. I just handed her my print, mumbling something about being sorry for having ruined the photo.

  She didn’t seem to care. Instead she asked how old I was. And who had sent me to Via Veneto. Then she gave me a bit of advice: “Remember, every time you do something like that—take a photo of someone—you first have to ask their approval.” I didn’t reply. I’d no idea what to say. I’d had a chance to see Anna Magnani in a dressing gown—something extremely satisfying for a kid my age—but nothing made up for the humiliation I felt. The first real photo job I’d attempted only reinforced my decision never to become a photographer. I was furious with myself for having failed, for not having captured a marvelous shot.

  I’ve followed the same principle throughout my career, every time I’ve pushed that button: when you transfer what you see with the naked eye to a mechanical eye, you need to be sure you get the same image you saw first. Click. I knew I had to satisfy not only my subject but also myself. On that occasion, I didn’t satisfy anyone. I still didn’t know how to follow and use my instincts.

  But why did Magnani want that photo in the first place? It was strange that an actress of her standing should have insisted on having a copy delivered. If she’d thought I was merely some kid playing with a camera, or even a real photographer in search of a juicy scoop, she wouldn’t have stopped me and she certainly wouldn’t have asked to see the photo. Something about my attitude must have struck her.

  Via Veneto was always an important crossroads to me, a fundamental place, alive with significant coincidences, like that moment with the gypsy woman. A few years earlier I’d experienced another one of those moments, without realizing it at the time. Back then the guy everyone adored in my neighborhood was an accountant by the name of Marcello Mastroianni. That’s right, an accountant. He grew up in Via San Remo, just a few blocks from my house. He, too, was a frequent visitor to Via Veneto’s cultural watershed.

  In those days, the baker’s son—some seven or eight years older—used to take me to our local bar to play pool. According to the rules, I shouldn’t have been allowed to play because I was only ten. But every now and then the older guys would let me play anyway. One day Marcello stopped to watch one of our matches. When he got his turn on the table, he asked to play against me and I won. He gave me a 5-lira banknote, worth a loaf of bread or a few pieces of candy back then. That evening I proudly showed the banknote to my father. He promptly scolded me for not getting Marcello to autograph it.

  It wasn’t until months later that I understood why my father was annoyed. Carlo Lizzani’s award-winning 1954 movie, Chronicle of Poor Lovers, hit the theaters, and suddenly, up there on the big screen, was our local hero, Marcello Mastroianni. Of course, by then I’d long spent the 5 liras, while Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—which would make Marcello an international star—was still another ten years off. But my father, along with everyone else, already knew Marcello had something special.

  After our pool game, he was always very friendly to me. And over the years I came to know him fairly well. He was a marvelous person, always very elegant, always smiling. Every now and then he’d ask if there was anything he could do for me. He glittered like a rising star, a vision, someone destined for fame. On one occasion he took me for a drive in his Jaguar convertible. People stopped just to watch us go by. In truth, all we did was take a turn around Piazza Ragusa, hardly Rome’s most famous square. But I felt like I’d flown around the world.

  The more that cinema came looking for me, the more I went looking for it. I’d skip school and hang out in cinemas, catching any movie I could. I don’t recall ever going with my mother or father, and I never went to any theater drama productions. I was fascinated by American movies, so different from Italian neorealism. The people, whether beautiful or ugly, driving luxury cars or beaten-up old wrecks, always looked happy. And the movie that struck me more than any other wasn’t Italian. It was the 1956 Robert Wise movie, Somebody Up There Likes Me, starring a young Paul Newman as boxing champ Rocky Graziano. What got me was the story, a boy struggling to find his way up in the world. I could identify with the same sense of exclusion, with the many trials Newman had to suffer to find his way in life, to find an identity. The character Newman played doubted that he shared his father’s vocation to be a boxer just as I questioned the idea of following in my own father’s footsteps as a photographer.

  Meanwhile, between skipping school and spending afternoons out stealing with my gang, I watched American cinema evolve from the westerns I’d loved as a kid to different kinds of films starring my favorite actor, James Dean: East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause. Years later, Elizabeth Taylor told me that one of Dean’s favorite sayings had always been: “Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.” It’s been a favorite of mine ever since.

  I started toying with the idea that maybe I could become an actor myself. For me and other kids my age, cinema was a way out, especially American cinema, with its luxury and its immortal heroes. I didn’t like my world, and school was part of that world. I thought cinema might provide an alternative. Back then, however, the only place you could study acting in Rome was at the famous Cinecittà Studios. And the price was exorbitant. The students were all rich kids, people like Prince Orsini. I lost all hope. I didn’t think I had a chance.

  I felt like a prisoner of war plotting my escape, trying to find some gap that I could squeeze through, never losing the feeling that I could fly, the feeling Mastroianni had given me with
that spin in his car. I racked my brain, imagining and dreaming of ways to flee the real world. Meanwhile, I was stuck with the one I had.

  That summer vacation, aged thirteen, I went to work with my father in his darkroom and began to get a taste for real money—or what seemed like real money to a teenager. Come autumn, I couldn’t figure out why I should sit still in class all day instead of going out to work. I liked the hands-on learning I got from my father and thought school was just a waste of time. Mine was more of a technical college than a high school, designed to introduce youngsters to a work environment. I signed up for the photography course. But I was more capable than my teachers. And they knew it. So they wouldn’t include me on fun day trips away from school. They wouldn’t give me the interesting homework that they gave the rest of the class. They knew I was better than they were and they resented it. The lack of humility typical of a teenager got the better of me, and I quit attending class.

  I’d leave home in the morning, go to school and then, when the bell rang, slip out of a side door in the gymnasium and spend my day hanging out in the park with the other kids who’d skipped school. Or I’d slip into a cinema through the service door and watch one movie after another until some attendant nabbed me.

  From time to time I’d work for Beautiful Babies of Italy. This involved me knocking on doors and taking free photos of people’s babies. The organization paid me by the roll. They’d make prints of the little guys, and then send sales staff to flog contact prints of my shots to the parents. It was kind of a scam, really. I’d manage to do the work before school ended and get back in time for the bell, when I’d slip in through the gymnasium and leave through the front door.

  This couldn’t last, of course. Eventually the school wrote to my parents asking where I’d been. The next day my father went to school before classes ended and confirmed my absence for himself. When I reappeared later that afternoon, he exploded. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps at the Pathology of the Book Institute, and I couldn’t do that without a high school diploma.

  I knew only one sure thing about my future: I wasn’t going to end up like my father, leaving home early in the morning, spending his days in a blacked-out darkroom, and getting home late at night, all for a pittance of a salary. That’s what a photographer’s life looked like to me. I didn’t realize there was a difference between artistic work and technical work, and that you need to master both. Everything I knew about photography I’d learned from my father, and I couldn’t imagine how a camera would lead me into any other life than one like his. I told him to his face that he didn’t earn enough, that he was letting himself be exploited by the government, and that I didn’t want to end up like him. He slapped my head so hard that he fractured his wrist and little finger.

  Shortly before I turned fourteen, my father and I sat down to talk and he asked me straight: “What do you want to do? Do you want to leave school? I won’t let you do that until you graduate.”

  I replied, “Okay, let’s cut a deal. If I get top marks this year will you let me leave?”

  My father laughed. “I accept the bet. You’ll never, ever finish the year with top grades.”

  That autumn I threw myself into my books, and my grades began to improve. I had a lot of trouble with the woman who taught math and chemistry. She was convinced I was cheating, and the other teachers were highly suspicious too. They kept making me change my desk. They made me sit right up in the front row so they could find out what my trick was. But there was no trick. I’d simply never studied before. Now I was determined to show my father he was wrong.

  When he saw my grades, he didn’t believe me either. “How have you done this? You must have cheated.”

  He kept saying the same thing every time I brought him my latest school report. In the end, though, I finished the year with top grades and my father, to his regret, had to let me leave school and go to work. We’d made a bet and he kept his word. But did I really win? I still ask myself that question. I came to regret leaving school, because dropping out meant I missed out on a lot of learning and culture.

  My father could claim a smaller victory. I was as determined as ever never to work in his darkroom, but I did want to earn money. And the only thing I knew how to do was develop photographs. In one sense, my dilemma was the same as ever: either go to school or go to a darkroom.

  But now it was my decision, and that was enough for me. My dreams were the same as any other fifteen-year-old’s: get rich, leave a mark, be the best in something. Right then, however, I didn’t have the slightest clue what that “something” might be.

  Chapter 2

  A Roman Rebel without a Cause

  One week after my final grades were posted, I found work in the Magicolor photo shop. The moment I arrived on my first day they gave me a mop and I spent the entire day cleaning the floor. The next day they made me wash the whole place: the equipment, the workbenches, the windows, everything. The third day they told me I was going to have to mop the floor again. I dunked a sponge in my bucket of water and threw it in the owner’s face. “Clean it yourself,” I said. “I quit.”

  If I absolutely had to work in a photo shop, at least I wanted a proper job, not work as a cleaning boy. So I found a job at a different photo shop near the Trevi Fountain. It mostly handled amateur photos. I developed and printed one hundred rolls a day. It felt like a jail sentence. I was basically doing exactly what my father did, spending my whole day in a darkroom. I clocked in early in the morning, when it was still dark, and left in the evening. I didn’t see the sun for months and months. But I was happy to be making a bit of cash. Then summer came to an end, and work began to tail off. People had quit taking vacation photos for the year.

  Then I heard about a job with Telephoto, a photo shop near Trinità dei Monti and the Spanish Steps. It specialized in cinema film. The pay was good and the work constant throughout the year. What’s more, I’d be developing professional film set photos, which I considered much more interesting and demanding. Telephoto was on an entirely different level. Instead of turning out hundreds of amateur 10 × 15s, it handled images of extremely high quality, enlargements of all sizes, different lenses, different formats, glossy, matte, posters, everything. The company developed and printed a lot of Italian movies. I remember two by Pietro Germi: his 1958 movie A Man of Straw and the 1959 The Facts of Murder, starring Germi himself along with a young Claudia Cardinale. We also handled a lot of famous foreign movies, like Ben Hur and Spartacus, and everyone was on pins and needles when the negatives of Cleopatra arrived from England. In our own small way, we worked with the biggest movie ever made as well as with the world’s biggest movie star, Elizabeth Taylor.

  Unfortunately, the work at Telephoto proved harmful to my health. I did a lot of retouching of positives and negatives using solutions and gels that gave me bags under my eyes and wrinkles like the ones I was magically removing from prints with scalpel, brush, and Indian ink. I didn’t realize that Telephoto was using those substances at concentrations of 100 percent in order to speed up the developing process. In the end, what with me developing all that film by hand, I got seriously ill. My bosses begged me to come back when I got better. But my father, outraged at the risks they’d exposed me to, insisted I find another job. So I was obliged to quit and get by on whatever odd jobs I could pick up around town: a retouch here, a photo there. I collaborated with the Luxardo and Cantera studios and, for a while, got steady work with the famous Canadian archaeologist-photographer Roloff Beny. He toured the world photographing ruins in places like Tuscany, India, Mongolia, Iran. It gave me a chance to handle fascinating, exotic images. Beny used very large negatives and closed the stop right down in order to capture as much detail as possible. My job was to hide the errors, correct the imperfections, sharpen the focus, and produce absolutely perfect prints. Beny adored my work. And he adored me too . . . rather too much. I was seventeen. In Europe at that time you still didn’t see many people in tight jeans and running shoes. My red
hair and American style gave me a very special look, especially on the streets of Rome. And—to guys like Beny—that look clearly conveyed the wrong impression. Eventually he became a tad too friendly. Once again, I was obliged to quit.

  I kept learning whatever I could from famous photographers I’d meet, such as Ivan Tchicanovich. It was he who taught me how to exploit light, which became one of my most valuable techniques. The word photography comes from the Greek phōtos and graphé, which together mean “drawing with light.” If you use light in the right way, you don’t need to retouch the image with chemicals or ink—nor with a computer, as they do today. Adjusting the light to smooth out imperfections confers a truth and purity to images that is lost if you rely on retouching later in the darkroom. I learned that lesson so well that, throughout my career, I rarely had to retouch my own photos.

  Tchicanovich was very demanding and meticulous. He wanted everything to be very fluid, bathed in light tones of gray. He’d underexpose and overexpose his film in order to give the photos very little contrast. It was a style suited to the glossy tourism and nature magazines that published his photos. To my mind, however, the lack of contrast produced prints that were flat and dull. There was less of the realism and clarity that I was accustomed to seeing in my own photos, in those of my father, in neorealist cinema, and out on the street. Tchicanovich said I was young and presumptuous. It took me years to realize that, in reality, the object of our argument was his style compared with what would become mine: the glossy fashion magazines against the naked eye, which goes beyond artifice and celebrity, penetrating the intimacy of its subject. At the time I knew I was right because my father shared my opinion about Tchicanovich’s technique. So, I was putting in eight, nine hours a day in a darkroom, with no artistic satisfaction, printing photos I didn’t like. What did I do a few weeks later? Sure, I quit.