A group of young girls in stage costumes waits for the curtain to rise. In their gestures, their postures, and the way they wait, childhood is still present, with its natural oscillation between concentration and play. Mario Amura photographed this scene in 2009, during a performance by the Gena Pinto School of Classical Dance in Torre Annunziata. He would continue to frequent the school for more than fifteen years, a sustained presence that established a particular equilibrium between photographer and subject. Each had learned where to be; each knew the order of things, and no one any longer needed to look up to locate the other. The image emerges from within this intimacy.
Exposure time draws alongside light. Some figures remain still long enough to acquire solidity; others move, their contours becoming uncertain, their profiles emerging at different degrees of intensity. One might think of Degas and his enduring fascination with the world of dance observed in its preparatory moments, before the body is entrusted to the perfection of performance. Yet the light in Behind the Curtain possesses a different gravity: it allows certain faces to emerge while holding others within the darkness, establishing a relationship with shadow that belongs to an older pictorial memory and may recall Rembrandt.
What gives this photograph its singular character is the correspondence between its subject and the means through which the work represents it. The girls are experiencing a period of waiting, and waiting is precisely what the duration of the exposure retains. There is no separation between what takes place before the lens and what takes place within the camera: the seconds passing behind the curtain are the same seconds that accumulate upon the photographic surface.