THE PERFECT CLOUD by MARIO VIDOR

Lanfranco Colombo

Mario is the first name of a gentleman, excuse me I mean to say A GENTLEMAN whose surname is Vidor. I have known him for many years and I have always considered him a beautiful man with an honourable family. Right from the start Mario knew how to take good pictures which always got better and better, making beautiful postcards full of stimulating content. Today with THE PERFECT CLOUD he offers readers excellent sequences showing worthwhile, curious and intelligent research.
If my readers will forgive a few personal remarks, I’d like to recount how a few years ago I went to Portofino with a photographer who was much better than me. Her name was Giuliana Traverso, now Giuliana Traverso in Colombo: teacher of X students. Asking our precious collaborator, Orietta Bay, what number I should put instead of X, the answer was more than 2,000, as for years the ‘Woman Photographer’ has taught more than 2,000 other women. As a mere man in this harem of intelligence I was often in despair. I have told you this because I want to let you know that Giuliana confessed to many ex-students of hers that she had been operated on twice for cataracts in Nice and that the second time, although she had always photographed clouds in black and white, afterwards rendering them in different colours, for the first time she had become able to see the shadows that clouds make on the sea.

Thank you Mario for your series of so many clouds. I am so emotional that looking at your photographs has brought some fresh moistness to these eyes that first saw the light almost 86 years ago.
You have photographed the skies of Florence, Venice, Sicily, Friuli and all of Italy; in Europe too, especially in Iceland, and all over the world, reminding us with your assemblies of clouds of Don Quixote and Tartarin de Tarascon, of many characters from the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and of the painted gloomy clouds of the scenery in the finale of Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ with Albertazzi shouting ‘Mama, give me the salt!’ to free himself of the drug. I want to continue by thanking in your name the peasant, the climber, the landscape artist, the writer in light, the painter Mario Vidor who, firstly with analogue equipment and then with digital technology, aimed to give us so many blue skies filled with the clouds created by God to make us dream. Do you remember the stories of Gulliver, the chronicles of Commandant Nobel with his dirigible Italia, or does Pinocchio mean something to you? Carry on dreaming, page after page, with great big clouds and the tiny little clouds that come out of the mouth of Goofy in a Walt Disney comic. Do you remember when your mother told you: ‘put on your raincoat or take the umbrella, because a sky full of clouds like sheep will bring rain’? I call on you, Tom Mix, because when you escaped from the bandits, your horse made a cloud of dust. Remember, red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.

I remember when the sky was full of clouds during the second world war, I was full of happiness because it made it more difficult for the Flying Fortresses to hit the FIAT works in Turin, flying among the clouds over the Grandes Jorasses. I’ll stop here, I hate Vidor’s telephone which tells me ‘I have to leave you to photograph a big black cloud that promises rain.’ I have always been and still am someone who likes to provoke, and so I answer ‘Mario, don’t exaggerate, clouds are made of ice crystals and drops of water, they are the little pearls that allow life to exist and when there aren’t any we are left with arid desert.’
If you are high in the mountains you can see the clouds from closer up, and you get the impression that they sail in the atmosphere like ships in a storm. If, on the other hand, you are at sea and they forecast a storm, you discover how Mario has done cirrus and cumulus, cumulus and nimbus, nimbus and stratus, and you point the prow of your sailing boat or your motor boat to the nearest port. If you are in an aeroplane entering a cumulo-nimbus cloud, the machine starts to dance with big jumps up and down, but don’t be frightened, nothing is happening and as soon as you land, look at Mario’s book and breathe happily.
Once, years ago, on a DC9 above the Aeolian Isles, from my porthole I admired a cirro-cumulus that was white and had a little beard, which wasn’t white, and I thought ‘Take a brush, dip it in the cloud and then you will shine’. Thank you for this chance to write the fairy story your images brought to my mind, I’m going straight to my CD player to listen to a piece by Chopin, played by Daniel Barenboim.
Thank you Vidor, you are my first mountain photographer, chosen to appear in a wonderful magazine with a title that is a welcome programme for both of us ‘L'Eco delle Dolomiti’.