The photos are in black and white. Something raw and violent emerges. Sometimes we see weapons, a gun, a chain. Other times a graffiti, funny, radical, extremist. And then there are shouts. The faces of young Turinese in the streets of their city, or in the stands of the stadium of their favorite team, Torino, Juventus. They are football fans. They belong to ultra groups. It’s the late 1970s, and no one has ever seen this. The photos were published in 1980 in a book, Ragazzi di stadio (“The young people” or “the stadium guys”, in French, Editor’s note), today as cult as it is unobtainable. Their author, Daniele Segre, died on Sunday February 4, at the age of 71.
In 2011, on the occasion of our special edition dedicated to supporters, So Foot had republished part of this historic series, and asked Daniele Segre why his work had had such an impact. « Because for the first time, we did not criminalize supportershe then replied. They are not presented as absolute evil. The viewer’s eye is absolutely not guided towards an idea of evil, there are no shortcuts, as journalists can sometimes do. The photos simply represent characters in their own right, with the complexity of their existence, without saying “It’s good” or “it’s bad”. They tell these supporters, that’s all. » The photos weren’t just about football. They spoke of an era and a country in complete upheaval. It was the first time that this was told through the prism of a football stadium and its most vehement supporters. It was incredible.
Daniele Segre began his photographic work on the ultras because he was intrigued by the graffiti that multiplied on the walls of Turin at the end of the 1970s. One tag had marked him more than another: power must be black and white – “power must be black and white”, seen one day in 1977. Ten years earlier, in 1968, the demonstrators shouted power must be workers – “power must be working-class”. « How did we go from one to the other? It was this mutation that interested meexplained Daniele Segre to So Foot in 2011. More than anything else, this change testified, I believe, to a certain confusion among the youth of the time, a confusion which was also mine. » So Segre began to do what he will do throughout his life in his work: create a relationship with those he wanted to film or take a photo of. For two years, Daniele Segre frequented Juventus Fighterset the Torino Ultras. In the aisles, he sees young people from the sub-proletariat mixing with the upper bourgeoisie, some tending towards the extreme left, others towards the extreme right. Segre is everywhere: in the processions, in the preparations for the tifos, in the weekly meetings, even participates in certain trips. And, when he feels like something is happening, he takes out his Nikon, and clicks, as if nothing had happened. The book will become a documentary, just as legendary.
The supporters interested him because they were on the fringes of society. The fragile and the marginalized, these are the people the director has been concerned about all his life. His films have been said to be “cinema of reality” because he was in touch with reality and Segre did not invent anything. Forty years after his first Stadium boys, he had documented the Juventus ultras again, this time focusing on the Drughi. Usually very hostile to any form of camera and publicity, they had agreed to be filmed and to open their doors because it was him, because he had done what he had done 40 years earlier , because they also knew that there would be no judgment.
Juve nabs the derby right under Torino’s nose
Photos: Daniele Segre, Ragazzi di Stadio, published in the special supporters’ magazine So Foot (special issue, winter 2012).
2024-02-06 08:23:06
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