Giuseppe Chiari and Gianni Melotti, in front and behind the camera. Photography documenting and interpreting performance

The professional and human relationship be- tween Giuseppe Chiari – Fluxus composer and visual artist as well as conceptual artist who arrived at performance – and Gianni Melotti – a young photographer who experimented with both documentary and more creative photography in the Seventies – allows us to explore some of the many facets of the interaction between photogra- phy and performance at that historical moment. Faced with increasingly varied artistic proposals that were often far from the work-object tradition, photography became a fundamental ally in the visual recording of the very existence of the operation and, decades later, it constitutes a valuable documentation, along with the film and video recordings, of artistic modalities based on action, behaviour, execution, interaction with the audi- ence or the space, deliberately delivered to the contingency of the moment and mostly without documentary publications.