Sometimes there are sets of images that you don’t know how to grasp, that you struggle to name, but which nevertheless fascinate. They catch and shake you, but you don’t really know where they’re going, what they’re about, or even if they’re trying to tell you something, if they’re trying to explain themselves.

Instinct? Certainly. But nourished, racy, lucid. Art brut? Too vast a question, and too narrow, too precise a purpose. Aesthetic pose? Certainly not. If the mania for misfiring and misfiring has its followers and its theorists (a little too many at times), there is no calculation, no strategy here. There’s too much mess in these images – but an eloquent, “targeted” mess, so to speak – and there’s too little sense of ego in the man behind them.

Who is he, anyway? Salvatore. Period. What does he offer us? Meditations, which is both a little vague and very generous. Ours, perhaps even more than his own. Randomness, then? Far from it: let’s take a closer look.

For, despite the scarcity of information and the absence of a discourse, or any pretension to one, and failing to identify a trajectory, we nevertheless manage to gather impressions and scattered crumbs.

Salvatore is a photographer. He has lived in Brussels since he was born, almost half a century ago. If he says he prefers discretion, even anonymity, there’s every reason to believe him (before he escapes or slips away). A lover of the arts, of images and of philosophy, he has been photographing things and people that are close to his heart for years, in black and white.

If he doesn’t live on the street, he lives near it. And it’s as if the social and the visible – to put it mildly – were one and the same enigma in his eyes. The blurring, overexposure and superimposition sometimes make it difficult to draw the line between joy and sorrow, the essential and the anecdotal (which is not always equivalent to the heavy and the light), the living and the inert. But a palpable energy and a constant questioning translate, in his own way and in a non-linear writing style, a real, total commitment. A rare and precious thing!

And radiant enough that, under the impetus of L’image sans nom, the BIP and its team opened their doors, so that the Première Lame collection (from Editions du Caïd) and its team, with the help of Ophélie Blanck, conceived a publication; so that, for want of a name, Salvatore made himself a clearly identifiable first name. For there is undoubtedly something to see in and around him, and that alone is enough, and that alone counts.

text Emmanuel d’Autreppe