Cahier nr.6 - Lo stato delle cose
or me, photography is a meditative act, a means of thinking about the state of things by decoding the values and symbolic aspects to which images allude. It is a way of being in the world, documenting the landscape that goes beyond vision, seeking the essence of things and showing it.
Everything is perceived as a gigantic human and terrestrial archive. The moment of the shot comes across as an epiphany that involves me deeply, where photography becomes a visual testimony to a story of the mind.
With this project entitled The State of Things, I wanted to document the conflicting and problematic relationship that contemporary man experiences with Nature, but also the state of my photographic re-search. While in the past my images often showed ancestral or unspoilt places, now there are human beings as foreign bodies, spectators on the landscape or creators of a Nature merely painted or reproduced on scre-ens. The photograph taken at the Passo del Tonale at an altitude of three thousand metres depicts the last fragment of the glacier, covered with geotextile sheets, like a great white tongue bobbing on this barren land.
This desolate vision is contrasted by the image of Narcissus, reflected in the water until he sinks into the earth, almost being absorbed by it. A sal-vific gesture of forgiveness for the sin of Hybris, sanctioning the end of detachment and the desire to connect with the world of nature. A pure and primordial water, contrasting with the dark stain of a woman dressed in black, or the dark dog on the windswept dunes appear as inserts of a silent and contemplative humanity. Fragments of nature are glimpsed through tarnished glass; landscapes are painted, as if suspended on the threshold between the real and the imaginary. All these elements go towards making up the great alphabet of my personal visual philosophy.