Night pharmacy is the first photo book by Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo, the two directors of the debut film La Terra dell’abbastanza, winner of the Nastro D’Argento award in 2018, and of Favolacce, in competition at the 2020 Berlinale Festival. The book is a beautiful, fun and surreal conversation on photography, which illustrates their hunger to see, their need to express themselves through any language.
Night pharmacy retraces childhood memories, events or distant experiences, as if the twin brothers had already taken notes about that, in the form of an extremely ironic and spontaneous dialogue. Leafing through the pages of the book, the conversation reveals their concept of photography, while they tell their life, underlining the differences between brothers: “I would like to tell, with these photos, something mysterious… and about myself, something that can become yours too, but you must want to know me…”
The color snapshots within the book, together with the conversation, turn into something different according to who the photographer is; pictures can change their sense in line with observer’s sensitivity and mood. Photography, for the visionary D’Innocenzo brothers, is not just a document of what happened, but the happening itself, shaped at the time the shot was taken: «When you photograph, you don’t redo the world, you make it happen there, it is only there, the world is the photo, not the other way round, I mean…».
