Interpretare “con-testi”. Cancian, Lacedonia e i lacedoniesi oltre le foto, a partire da un carteggio privato (1957 - 2020)

In 1957 Frank Cancian, a young American student and photographer, had the opportunity to come to Italy (in Lacedonia) and photograph the rural reality of Irpina. In 2012, the rediscovery by the Lacedonians of the photographic collection of 1801 images produced by Frank Cancian, allowed the reconstruction of a relationship between Lacedonia and the American, who, in the meantime, became emeritus professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Irvine. Starting from a collection of documents, containing the correspondence between Cancian and some Lacedonians, this essay tries to retrace the human, methodological and scientific experience of the young American photographer in the small town of Southern Italy. The analysis of the corpus of letters also makes it possible to put forward interpretative proposals on how this distant relationship was built and on the communication strategies that allow us to move from an “affective community” to the constitution of what Vincenzo Esposito defines as an “affective community of memory “.