Walter Benjamin, who was among other things a great photographer, while once reasoning about fashion happened to quote a Leopardi's work entitled Dialogue Between Fashion and death. According to Leopardi, the great challenge between two entities - the most ephemeral and the  most definitive - was played on the conflict whith the organic element. And it was just Fashion to assert "the rights of the corpse" in relation to the living one. 
It was at this point that Benjamin conied one of his boldest metaphors: the sex appeal of inorganic element. The non living thing, even intended as merchandise or fashion, was not only a source of estrangement or anguish, but also of attraction.
    Photography - not as an abstract concept, but as printed image - is the most "ordinary" example  of such sex appeal. The challenge between the vital organic world and the dead inorganic world finds a ceaseless lighting in the photography. The desire flowing in a photo's fixed and motionless image is exacly the desire for the inorganic element. For the thing itself.
    As a matter of fact, it's this world of reification that is lived as an extreme seduction, as an inextinguishable pleasure. And it's just that reified pleasure which induces such irresistible sex appeal (and the English language but American culture form reveals subtle and intriguing ironies in Benjamin) to find in this light, bidimensional, black and white or colour thing, its biggest fetish. Plural fetish: indifferently usable in an ethnographic, Sadian or Marxian, sense.
Each photo plays the "Big fetish" talking to us, in spite of its apparent absence of words, about the inextinguishable pleasure given us by dead things.   

                   Massimo Canevacci