It might be a dull, grey day, outside as inside, in the sky as in your soul. It doesn't matter. Walking is easy. Then just keep walking, and trust the streets. Today from Putney Bridge to Bank, via Battersea. Project "Brit Faces" just got a new portrait.
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I took my new Sigma lens out for a walk from the Tower of London to Greenwich via Rotherhithe. Project "Brit Faces" just got two new portraits.
During Easter break, I spent a week in Anzio (Rome, Italy), the place were I grew up. This time turned out to be a terribly prolific one for photographs: I could indeed make a number of studio/outdoor portraits thanks to my beloved grandparents and beloved friends (thank you so much!). Most importantly, project "Lost Gods: My Best of Youth" has just kicked off.
This is an age of walls (Trump, Brexit). But there are at least two relatively much higher walls that we have to deal with in everyday life and which lie within ourselves. The first one is a communication wall: from cognitive relativism to emotional disconnection in an highly individualistic society, reaching - and being reached by - anybody else tangibly amounts to an impossible endeavour. The second one is the wall of our personal limits, flaws and deficiencies, namely those somehow evident imperfections which constrain our personal potential up to a greater or lesser extent.
To me, photography has recently become a therapy for both walls. By digging a hole in the communication wall, photography’s act aims to extrapolate a spark of beauty/sense/strength/emotion from the subject, and to reframe it in order to discard whatever distracting residual is still left. As Leonard Cohen once sang: "There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in". In regards to the other wall, by constant practice and in an attempt to take advantage of my brain’s plasticity, photographing pushes myself to the edge defined by all the endless imperfections of my pictures, thus challenging myself to go beyond them. Hence the title of this post: practicing, practicing, practicing. |