Highlights June 2024
This month I selected these images
The only photograph in color of this selection is a self-portrait. And if I decided to propose it, it is not only because I like it a lot, but because it marks the beginning of a new path that I have just opened and that leads me to a different research, even on the street. Some ideas about it will be shared in this post.
My research this month has led me to an honest reflection with myself. What do I want at this point, after over 15 years of doing street photography? How much of my experience as a photographer who also does something else, much else, do I need to bring in to be truly satisfied with street photography? I have never followed fashions or trends, but rather I try to follow a path that can go hand in hand with my evolution as a photographer. Today I feel the need to push the limits even further and not care about anything that may or may not be liked. And this month's selection is proof of this, which is certainly not what many would expect.
The form as declaration of the intent. Unconventional choices that lead me to rethink everything. I am trying to write my own language by changing salient parts that lead me to greater risk. This is not just about my street photography but any photograph I want to do.
The more decisive return to black and white is the result of this adherence to my identity as a photographer in a much more decisive way than in the past. I just want to indulge myself, take greater risks, even at the cost of not being understood.
Photography does not have to be beautiful or even comfortable.
Authorial photography, that is, made by someone who has something to say, who wants to express a point of view, is the kind that is uncomfortable from the form, through technical decisions that provoke discussion, that demand an intention that goes beyond those rules that someone has decided to be universal or, at least, commonly accepted, in an academic principle that I frankly deny.
In the urgency of overcoming those practical systems of realization and reading, we must not fall into the trap of a superficial determinism, otherwise we end up not being sincere, first of all with ourselves.
The correct posture happens with experience, so much empiricism and hassles in the concrete that have already accepted frustration as a constantly present part of the workflow.
For me, matter and the tactile are part of the human and therefore photographic experience.
And I believe that street photography, like any other genre, must have this specific weight of giving you the sensation of the objects around us as well as of a skin, of the epidermis as a precious good to be respected also by us photographers.
I feel, now more than ever, that I must no longer focus my attention on an aesthetic that respects the rules, but rather stick to forms as I have never done before, except in my portrait photography, where I have pushed more in this direction, without conforming to the academies.
Ugo Mulas in LA FOTOGRAFIA was, I think, the first to reject the idea of the Bressonian fleeting moment.
Thought
Obviously these reflections do not want to deny anything. But certainly they are ideas that came to me. At a certain point a question arose, perhaps a stupid one: "how would Helmut Newton have photographed if he had been a street photographer?" Yet this question was like a bomb. It even generated reflections on the photographers I truly love, the works I got lost in and those that found me again.
SCARDINARE OGNI CERTEZZA is written now on my instagram bio. It's not a casuality because overturning every certainty is what I have always done in my life.
Today is a new day. Maybe a new beginning.
