Riding Time

“My yesterdays walk with me.” (William Golding)

Me (1 year and 7 months) and my father at 29 years old, and now.

Photography is not always tied to reality. Sometimes it can also be an illusory game, a dream.

It can speak to the present, recalling the past, mixing various time frames. Like when you browse old family albums, you hold the faded photographs showing you at tender age of only one day of life, or those temporal paradoxes in which our parents are represented before we were born. Or the photograph of my father's mother as a young girl.

Photography was born to represent the present moment, always. It cannot photograph the past or the future. But once the photo is printed, it leaves the temporal context, it becomes a non-time, and then we can alter that moment as if our heart became an alchemical laboratory...

These are the overlaid photographs that I created to surprise my mother and my father, and also to see myself talk with some stages of my life: the first day of life in the hands of my mother before heart surgery, then after a few years already with the chest striped from the operation, and then in recent years with the body already full of scars.

Me at first day of my life (11 January 1974), after some years, and in 2010.

My father looked with moved eyes at his young mother, without knowing—when I portrayed him—that I would then engrave his intense gaze in the shadows of a very young girl who would have been his mother.

My father, born in 15 January 1945, with her mother at 16 years old.

Or my mother talk over time with herself; she was always reluctant to be portrayed for an idea of old age that makes her sad, to look into the past when she was at the height of her beauty.

My mother, born in 18 October 1947, in the day of her wedding at 22 years old, and now.

It is an illusion, yes, a dream, and as such it caresses the heart and eyes but also hurts, because seeing—as the etymology of this word that goes back to Sanskrit teaches—means knowing, and only we know, in our loneliness enclosed in those photographs, how much we have suffered and endured for what we have lost and what we are no longer.

Photography always talks about us.

Dedicated to my mother and father... and to myself.

1974: Me in my second day of life and my moter (26 years old).

1977: Me (3 years old) and my mother (30 years old).

Italian version