I’m an Earthling myself

Kalvar’s pieces are short drama acts in which the characters are oblivious that they were assigned a role to act, a story far from their daily reality to sustain. A different role for each different viewer.

The best parallel I can think about is one with Ionesco’s plays. Just like the play writer, Richard Kalvar goes towards abstraction and towards the ridiculous, creating a parallel space from which he gazes at us.

What’s always interested me in photography is the way you can play with reality. Photography is based on reality, it looks like reality, but it’s not reality. That’s true of anyone’s pictures. It’s a picture of something, but it’s not the thing itself. It’s different from the reality – it doesn’t move in space, it has no sound, but it reminds you of reality – so much so that you believe its reality. From 2point8.

Richard Kalvar joined Magnum in 1975 and he keeps returning to Rome working on the Sieff book that never happened. Earthlings comes as a retrospective of his work over the past 40 years.

You can watch the Magnum photo essay dedicated to Kalvar here.