Dino Pietrali, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 2011

The volume collects 78 images dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini taken from the report that Dino Pedriali shot in the second week of October 1975. Pedriali was called by Pasolini himself to perform, in two sessions of two days each, a photo shoot between the two houses of Chia and Sabaudia, images that, according to the photographer, Pasolini would have liked to have included in his latest novel, published posthumously: Petrolio. Pedriali had to see Pasolini again to show him the photographs on 2 November 1975, the day when the poet’s body was found at Lido di Ostia. As in a film, the images guide us with poignant intensity in the life of the eclectic intellectual, in his moments of work and leisure – while he writes, corrects, draws -, in his wandering through the streets, in his medieval buen retiro up to in the intimacy of his room, where Pasolini is photographed naked from outside the house, in a game of studied surprise and unawareness, an agreement between the subject and the photographer to make the shots seem “stolen”. An unprecedented journey through frames that become with this volume a public and shared heritage, the ultimate testimony of Pasolini’s legacy and the artistic value of Dino Pedriali, a continuous reference to the poetics and imagery of Pasolini’s films.