A Manifesto for a

Democratic Photography

Photography does not need permission to exist.

It does not need a spectacular subject, an expensive camera, an extraordinary life, or a dramatic event. It only needs someone willing to look.

What follows is not a set of rules. It is a set of convictions. They are principles for the way I choose to photograph, not commandments for everyone. They describe the kind of photography I believe in, while leaving room for those who believe differently.

A personal disclaimer

This manifesto is grounded in my own experience as a photographer, in the way I have learned to look, work and understand photography over the years. I recognize myself in these convictions, but I make no claim that they represent a universal truth or that others should agree with them. Photography is too diverse for that. These are simply the principles that make sense to me, and the ones I choose to stand behind.

1. Photography belongs to everyone

I do not believe photography belongs exclusively to professionals, artists, collectors, or those who can afford sophisticated equipment. A camera is a tool, not a passport.

A DSLR, a compact camera, an old film camera, or a smartphone can all become instruments of serious photographic thought.

2. I do not need to chase events

I do not believe that a photograph needs an important event in order to exist. In fact, I rarely photograph the classic events that return every year: carnivals, religious celebrations, Pride parades, and the endless calendar of spectacles that photographers repeatedly chase.

If I had chosen photography with the mentality of an employee simply waiting for the next assignment, I might as well have remained an employee. There are already enough photographers approaching the world like employees, returning year after year to photograph the same events, as if photography begins only when something spectacular happens.

I am interested instead in the street corner, the empty room, the parked car, the wall, the shadow, the person waiting, the landscape without an event. I accept the nothingness, the ordinary and the apparently insignificant. I believe in the photographic value of the Cesare Zavattini’s qualsiasità: the possibility that the seemingly unremarkable may become meaningful simply because I have looked at it carefully.

3. I photograph what is there

My photography begins with attention to the world rather than the invention of a world.

I do not need to manufacture significance. I can find it.

I accept the accidental, the banal, the awkward, the incomplete and the unresolved. Reality does not need to perform for my camera.

4. I simplify the experience of photography

The camera should not become an obstacle between us and the world.

I believe in a simple photographic practice: go out, look, walk, wait, recognize, photograph.

Technique matters, but technique is not the subject. The more complicated photography becomes, the easier it is to forget why we began looking in the first place.

5. I believe seeing is more important than equipment

A better camera does not necessarily produce a better photograph.

What matters is the capacity to recognize relationships between things: a color beside another color, a person within a space, a shape interrupted by a shadow, a coincidence that lasts for a fraction of a second.

Photography is ultimately an act of seeing.

6. I do not photograph only when something happens

Photography has often privileged the event: the protest, the accident, the celebrity, the tragedy, the celebration. I am interested in what happens before, after and between events.

There is a whole world of photography in which nothing spectacular occurs. I do not consider this a limitation. I consider it a territory.

7. I accept the world as complex, but photograph it simply

The world is complicated. A photograph does not have to be.

I believe in reduction, clarity and attention. Not because reality is simple, but because the act of photographing can isolate one small portion of its complexity and allow me to contemplate it.

A photograph can be modest without being superficial.

8. I respect the people and places I photograph

A democratic photography does not require domination.

I do not believe that photographing someone gives me ownership of their existence. I approach people, places and situations with attention and responsibility.

The photographer has freedom. That freedom carries responsibility.

9. I do not believe there is only one correct way to make a photograph

Color or black and white. Film or digital. Smartphone or large format. Perfect sharpness or imperfection. Intention or accident.

None of these choices, by themselves, makes a photograph serious.

What matters to me is the relationship between the photographer, the world and the resulting image.

10. Photography is an invitation to look again

My photograph does not have to explain everything.

Sometimes its greatest achievement is simply to make us stop.

To look at something we would normally ignore. To reconsider an ordinary place. To notice a small relationship between things. To understand that the world is full of photographs even when nothing appears to be happening.

This is the photography I believe in.

A photography without hierarchies of subject.

A photography without equipment worship.

A photography open to the ordinary, the accidental and the apparently useless.

A photography that can be made anywhere, by anyone, with almost anything.

Not because every photograph is automatically meaningful, but because everything is potentially worth looking at.

These are not rules for photography, and I do not expect anyone else to follow them.

They are reasons to keep looking.