I'm Italian writer, and I live in Milan. I have lived in Berlin. I hold a degree in philosophy with a specialization in art criticism. I write stories in images and tell visions in words. What remains is superfluous, in Wittgenstein terms. I call myself a craftsman of the Irreality, I think I have the desire to retell reality, and I do it by taking photographs and writing. Early, I got the chance to play with acids and create rayographs. I love Polaroid, too. I have always been focused on details, the passage of time, and my body. Then, when I arrived in Berlin I started taking pictures of the city and its inhabitants, I mean the city life. Everything I saw: people, objects, sounds and colours, shadows ... I'm a photographer of the wait. I'm not looking for shots. I find them in the pauses. That's why I love taking pictures in the subway and bars: because I wait for the right shot. All in all, it perfectly fits with my being. I'm motionless. It's life that changes my colour and my age.
The photographs, that a street photographer takes, form a parallel life, without a chronological order, there is no a before and an after. Only feelings that continue in an extended present, the interior life. Smells, sounds, colors. Timeless yet so alive
"How it is disarming to know that nothing is as you are convinced that it is.
yet only the self-conviction can move us forward."
I don't think I'm essentially a street photographer. I guess Photography is just the way for me to express how I see things. It has something to do with a philosophical approach to reality. I have always had this way of observing reality, dwelling on details, on scenes that tell me something.
Early on in my life, I felt inspired by what was around me. Eventually, I got into street photography. It was a slow process. And this happened in a city that was not my hometown, where my view got released from all the parameters and preconceptions that you naturally develop in known places. What I perceived in that new urban landscape and became the ghost I kept freezing everywhere and in everyone’s face with my shots was an intense feeling of loneliness. As a photographer, I am already used to entering the world of loneliness because I must be able to become invisible. So I found myself breathing in my own loneliness and the solitude of those around me.
It is the distance between the photographer and the rest of the people that allows the photographer to notice what is overlooked and under-loved. I found this particular statement that confirms my thoughts: "...if love belongs to the poet, and fear to the novelist, then loneliness belongs to the photographer. To be a photographer is to willingly enter the world of the lonely because it is an artistic exercise in invisibility." - Hanya Yanagihara, Loneliness Belongs to the Photographer, The New Yorker. The photographer feels and represents the loneliness of humanity.
This society is turning us into monads... and Street photographers are those who daily tell us about the loneliness of mankind through their shots. And that’s why words are superfluous in this realm. Only by looking at photographs we can understand this.
"I'm not a photographer.
I think with my eyes."