Focus on: Anita Bingaman, photographer
By the time Anita Bingaman developed her impassioned interest in Italy, her children were already grown and raising families of their own. Today, with her warm laugh, outgoing personality and youthful freckles, you’d be hard put to guess that she has thirteen grandchildren. Back in 1999, inspired by “The Hill Towns of Italy” (Kauffman and Field), she and her husband Mel embarked on their maiden voyage to Italy: a two-week trip that included stops in Rome, Florence, Siena, Orvieto and Arrezzo. Smitten with Italian cuisine (Anita admits to being hopelessly hooked), dazzled by the art and antiquity and deeply impressed by the sense of community they found in city and small town alike, the Bingamans have returned every two years for two weeks, occasionally longer, to explore new regions, angles and aspects of Italy and to deepen their connection to the Italian people.
Always traveling on a tight budget, they stay in family-owned pensiones and typically get around by bus or train whenever possible, which obliges them to communicate in Italian much of the time. In my interview of Anita, I was struck by the extent to which she and her husband exemplify through their actions the informing principle of the original sister-city project: seeking out citizen-to-citizen contact. Anita and Mel have, in fact, made one-on-one interpersonal exchange their top priority. Building one bridge at a time, you might say.Most visitors to Italy focus their picture-taking on Italy’s vast artistic and architectural patrimony. Anita however, never one to favor the beaten path, prefers to explore the side streets and back roads, focusing her camera more frequently on the often overlooked but equally compelling everyday scene, or obscure monument. Her highly creative work has yet a certain documentary appeal to it. In one series of photos she showed me, she captured ordinary Italians at work outdoors, housewives making pasta on tables in front of their homes in the old town of Bari, Puglia, fishermen repairing their nets in Puglia or selling the catch of the day at open- air markets in Sicily. She hopes that viewers will engage with and even enlarge upon the the story encapsulated in her shots through their imagination, or research. Photography for Anita can also contribute to bridging the divide between the silent observer and her subject, as it often provides her with the need-- or at very least the excuse—to exchange a few words—preferably in Italian—with the people she photographs.
The bridge functions not only as a metaphor for connection in Anita’s Italian travel but as the visual leitmotif of choice in her photography. A prize she won in 2003 at the annual Carnavale of Seattle’s Dante Alighieri Society took the couple to Lucca, where they stayed in a rustic, restored farmhouse. That stay lit the fire for another, more extensive trip through parts of Tuscany, Liguria, Emilia-Romagna and the Veneto, for which the couple formed the project of discovering and photographing footbridges. As Anita later explained in her charming photographic record, Foot Bridging in Northern Italy (text by Wanda Fuller), sometimes she and Mel saw bridges they had thoroughly researched, and at other times they simply stumbled across them. They had intended to visit a bridge in the town of Barga, but never arrived there. Instead, she relates, in her introduction, “Winding through lovely woodlands along the [Serchio] river, we rounded a bend and beheld the most unusual bridge we had ever seen […] Mel parked the car and I unpacked my camera to photograph the startling bridge of the Maddalena.” The result of this unpredictability is a series of photographs that capture a sense of time and place, yet retain a sense of wonder, as well as a mysterious quality that Anita says she herself loves to come across in photographs.
Other memorably intense experiences for Anita involve the other senses: notably, taste, and hearing. Among the meals she has relished—and there are many-- she singles out a scrumptious torta di bietola (tart with chard) at a rustically charming and unpretentious working-class restaurant in Genoa , Antica Sa Pesta: Torte e Farinata (Sa pesta means salt ground with a pestle in Genoese dialect; the restaurant was originally a shop selling corse salt, which was ground to customer specification). She recalls another in Perugia, one of those gorgeous locales with medieval stone walls and arched ceilings, as much for the food as for her attempts to translate her husband’s numerous inquiries about the proper way to eat the spiny lobster being savored by a group of professors at a neighboring table. As to sound, she cites a phenomenon I myself have found mesmerizing. In cities and towns throughout Italy, she was profoundly moved by the astounding resonance of hundreds of conversations bouncing off the medieval stone walls and blending harmoniously. Perhaps you too have marveled at this sound, walking up the via dei Priori in Perugia at the hour of the passegiata.
Speaking of harmonious sounds, you can likely find Anita every first and third Sunday of the month at the lovely Caffe Umbria where she contributes, along with a dozen or more native and non-native speakers, to making SPSCA’s tavola italiana the premier place in town for Italian language exchange.
Susan Wolf
