What is your feeling with people? I mean not only at the beach but also in discos, in squares, in parks, in the mountains, in short, where you usually shoot…
I don’t think people are graphic signs that have to embellish my photos. I think everyone has his own life and I’m interested in inspecting it essentially through the relationships established between individuals, trying to capture their past and their future. I don’t take pictures because people are well arranged in space, because they have a nice color, because they have a green jacket or a purple bathing suit. I’m not a supporter of “beautiful photographs”: I want, hope, try, believe to take pictures that have multiple layers. I’m certainly interested in the landscape, but always in function of the relationship that people establish with the environment. Unfortunately, photography bears the stigma of the so-called “beautiful photography”, before the Düsseldorf School the whole problem of this expressive medium was linked to the creation of “beautiful pictures” and everybody tried, in one way or another, to pursue this goal. These German artists have somehow dismantled this idea of the “beautiful photo” or its subject. Even street photography, for instance, consisted in the fact that a photographer (I can say so because I also tried my hand at this genre) would go out in the morning, go to a place, which he considered chosen for his work, and if he came across a shocking scene he would shoot it thinking he had taken the picture of the month. But what is the reasoning behind it, what does it mean, why? Photography was only linked to a series of coincidences, events or non-occurrences, that is, tied to something external.
Noemi Pittaluga,”Photography for me is everything” in Massimo Vitali. Una storia italiana, Ledizioni, 2021, pp. 97-111.
