statement

What is a body when it turns into an image? What remains of the other when it is photographed? What is the hidden meaning of the moment in which an image is born?
And, exactly, what am I photographing when I am in front of a person?
These are questions I constantly bring along with me in my work, this practice may be found in the borderline between a lucid, planned, non-emotional nor impulsive working mode, and the depth of what I have experienced, the irreducibility of memory, the density of time.
“Who are you?” is the question guiding each single experience in and around a portrait. The people I implicitly ask this question are somehow part of my life; they sometimes just brush it, sometimes they are more deeply involved in it. The paths through which I end up working with them are multiple, sometimes this experience springs out of a request of mine, sometimes out of a request of theirs; sometimes we go together through several shooting sessions, sometimes it is just one. The sessions are usually very long and their duration is necessary to enable us to reach a zone which is only inhabited by body and silence. There is never an attempt to psychologically render the person, nor to create an emotional empathy; rather, there is an attempt to obtain pure presence; the surface dimension which is proper of the photographic image co-exists with a depth which is at the same time plasticity of the physical presence and sense of duration: the duration of posing, of experiencing, of the gaze. The duration of the session is then necessary to allow on the one hand to leave, so to say, my gaze decant from the moment it is laid on the object, in order to make it as much as possible free from wishes, projections, previous images; on the other hand it is needed to allow the photographed person to forget about himself/herself and to exhaust possible selfimages they might offer me. But it is also important for me to keep a strong consistency in the bodies, a need of theirs which is also their innocence.
In English the verb to shoot both means taking a picture and shooting with a weapon. But also capturing, catching, controlling, seizing, hunting, chasing, framing, instant, speed, are terms that are commonly referred to photography. It is a subtly aggressive, predatory terminology, denoting a vision of the photographic practice as a sample-taking, a removal and extraction from reality. On the contrary, my work goes towards inclusion, continuity, duration as opposed to instantaneousness; this continuity is shown through long and steady poses, through a detained gaze. They are found, not collected images; preserved, and not captured images.