Inter-human statements
Terroirs
(Juror's pick selection LensCulture B&W Awards 2021; Monochrome Award 2022; Grand Prix Paris Photo, 2022)
The project, started as a story of harvesters in South African Western Province, directed soon to transmit to represent their resilience and humanity. In photographing, I am very interested in the theatricality of human actions: in this project, the harvesters' performances have the fields and mountains of the Winelands of South Africa as their fifth and backdrop.
The Last Ritual
(Commended in Tokyo International Foto Awards 2022)
The Italian director P.P. Pasolini considered football "The last sacred ritual of our time". This ritual also inspired Paolo Sorrentino's recent film, "The Hand of God". The hand of God is otherwise invisible, just as the object of desire - - the sacred ball - - is not seen in my images.
W.W.W. ...... Who Watches Whom
(Winner, IPA Photobooks 2021, Category People )
Many photos from different music or sport events are assembled together for a physical "fusion : I want to emphasize the importance of real encounters, as opposed to "social networks", result-cause of social distance.
Vertigo
I feel a particular intoxication in even moderate altitudes, because in my childhood I loved climbing, and once I fell from a branch. It took me several years to climb back up without feeling a helpless vertigo, which has now turned into a subtle pleasure, like tasting a forbidden fruit.
Minority Report (2014)
Almost forgotten, in the cauldron of tourist consumerism and the zoo effect which is an effect of globalization, the Himba are back in the limelight since in 2020 the project of the dam on the Kunene River -- dating back to 2008 and put on hiatus in 2015 - - was resumed: the dam would flood the areas where their flocks have been grazing for hundreds of years. The interests of a small minority - - between southern Angola and northern Namibia, very grossly estimated between 12,000 and 25,000 - - will certainly not arrest those of powerful economic organizations.It is therefore very likely that photographing them is like photographing an endangered species.
Game Over (2010-2019)
My first open project to be started in digital photography, born in silence and solitude, in the mountains of Trentino: it wanted to show not the nostalgy, but the emotional strength of youth, which is not "lost", but regained with the imagination.
Islanders (2012-2022)
Foreword by Erri De Luca (translation by Jeffrey Kennedy) for the photobook
- - https://www.blurb.com/b/12461033-islanders - -
History recounts tales of many who were incarcerated in island prisons, because to the authorities it must have seemed that islands afford extra barriers, the waves, like a kind of barbed wire. And so they furnished those islands with a forest of bars: Asinara, Favignana, Elba, Gorgona, Pianosa, Procida, and in the Adriatic the notorious Goli Otok.
On Ischia, my childhood island home, at the end of the season we would pay a visit to the Castello Aragonese, seat of monasteries, but also of Bourbon prisons. Yes, islands are infamous, each one laden with its own thicket of memory, nightmare, and yearning.
I once disembarked on the island of Leros, swam in its sea, dined on its calamari, and drank in its sunset with my gaze. Now I flip through this reticent album of a lover of that island, reticent because it confines itself to black and white, as if we outsiders are not quite worthy of witnessing its colors. And I think I agree. Besides, isn’t it true that someone who merely writes down stories in a notebook, also reduces them to black and white?
The men and women in these images live without fascination for their place, stuck in that heat, ringed by beauty that is by no means cosmetic, painted, or illusory. No, that stark beauty is the very substantial power and daring of the waves.
Here, the inhabitants are surrounded by that vast element which dominates our entire planet. Thus, it is the island, and not the mainland, that embodies the very image and likeness of the world. For those of us of the Mediterranean, our ports are infinitely more vital than our train stations.
The images in this collection were, in a sense, stolen, certainly candid and unposed. A stranger must, after all, act deftly, being ever the intruder, even in the act of buying property, even when among the participants.
In this gallery of photos, there is derring-do, though always tempered by admiration, which disallows hyperbole or any unseemly perspective.
Of the monumental civilization and history contained in the poems and tragedies recited on all the world’s stages, there remains in these faces only the stern rebuke of the past. I discern their wrath at being the offspring of improvident ancestors, who left only the splendor of ruins, who squandered their gods and the Olympians, and who inadvertently provided vocabulary booty for all the world’s tongues. It is surely for spite that they call their tram “metafora” and any way out “exodos”.
It is from these descendants of those solemn, mythic revels that the photographer steals not just the images, but also the imprint -- the palimpsest left on the dusty ground or on a stony wall – of the Greek soul.
Terroirs
(Juror's pick selection LensCulture B&W Awards 2021; Monochrome Award 2022; Grand Prix Paris Photo, 2022)
The project, started as a story of harvesters in South African Western Province, directed soon to transmit to represent their resilience and humanity. In photographing, I am very interested in the theatricality of human actions: in this project, the harvesters' performances have the fields and mountains of the Winelands of South Africa as their fifth and backdrop.
The Last Ritual
(Commended in Tokyo International Foto Awards 2022)
The Italian director P.P. Pasolini considered football "The last sacred ritual of our time". This ritual also inspired Paolo Sorrentino's recent film, "The Hand of God". The hand of God is otherwise invisible, just as the object of desire - - the sacred ball - - is not seen in my images.
W.W.W. ...... Who Watches Whom
(Winner, IPA Photobooks 2021, Category People )
Many photos from different music or sport events are assembled together for a physical "fusion : I want to emphasize the importance of real encounters, as opposed to "social networks", result-cause of social distance.
Vertigo
I feel a particular intoxication in even moderate altitudes, because in my childhood I loved climbing, and once I fell from a branch. It took me several years to climb back up without feeling a helpless vertigo, which has now turned into a subtle pleasure, like tasting a forbidden fruit.
Minority Report (2014)
Almost forgotten, in the cauldron of tourist consumerism and the zoo effect which is an effect of globalization, the Himba are back in the limelight since in 2020 the project of the dam on the Kunene River -- dating back to 2008 and put on hiatus in 2015 - - was resumed: the dam would flood the areas where their flocks have been grazing for hundreds of years. The interests of a small minority - - between southern Angola and northern Namibia, very grossly estimated between 12,000 and 25,000 - - will certainly not arrest those of powerful economic organizations.
It is therefore very likely that photographing them is like photographing an endangered species.
Game Over (2010)
My first open project to be started in digital photography, born in silence and solitude, in the mountains of Trentino: it wanted to show not the nostalgy, but the emotional strength of youth, which is not "lost", but regained with the imagination.