Past and Present – Part One

Centocelle. Rome, 12 June 2009

Saving recent photographs on different external hard drives, as I do every now and then, I came across a folder that contained my very first photographs, dated June 2009.

I can therefore say with certainty that that was the period in which it all began: my present as a photographer.

They were mostly black and white images taken with a Sony bridge that I don't even know what happened to it, but it had a movable screen that allowed me to steal the photos.

Courage is learned over the years, not just the technique.

However, it is always impressive to see those images, because from the present we can go back to what we were but from the past, we cannot know what we will later become.

They are photographs wrapped in naive innocence, which is precisely the one that often leaves a bitter note in our mouth because it's impossible to find again after many years. Thirteen years is not a life, there are those who have been shooting for over forty years, but it is also enough time to change our skin many times. And for me, it was like that.

 

Of all these photographs I have chosen some because each flower keeps the sap of its roots and I would like to try to use them as an example of the vision of photography that I have matured over the years.

I didn't know it then but now I can see it clearly and read back in time.

Cultural curiosity

Vittorio square. Rome, 18 June 2009

It was my habit to go to Piazza Vittorio at the time, because markets have always been a passion of mine, in Asia as well as in Rome, and remain an important training ground for every photographer, especially in his first steps.

Many of the photographs from that period were taken in the Piazza Vittorio market, full of interesting faces and a mix of ethnicities.

The same goes for the small park adjacent to the market.

That's where I met Tanuja. It's amazing how quickly I forget a lot of things now, a sign of a memory that is falling apart but still remember the name of this Sri Lankan woman after so long.

I never saw her again, only that morning.

Perhaps because ardent of passion for a new means of expression I was more attentive to every single detail, so she still has her name, while hundreds of portraits are only faces.

I had been attending the Filipino community for a few years and I was already familiar with Steve McCurry's portraits, which were the first photographic books I bought.

A sort of intellectual itch began within me for different cultures and different faces. Her hair struck me, as very long, never seen in my life so long.

I took some pictures of her from afar, and she noticed me so I went over and asked if I could photograph her better because I was amazed by the hair. Her face lit up and she smiled at me, almost posing, certainly proud of her long hair.

It was then that she told me her name and that she was from Sri Lanka.

Now I fully understand, and it is an indissoluble and fundamental part of my portraits, how much a photograph can make people happy with little.

Especially the foreign women who live and work here with us.

What I think about it I have well written in a recent book, published on 2021, about the sense of beauty in the women of the diaspora of the Indian subcontinent.

“This I have learned over the years, that photography teaches beauty to the same women portrayed, first of all, then to others who see the images.

Each portrait is a cutout stolen from the daily routine that leads them to forget about themselves.

[...]

Then the incredible care they give to make-up, hairstyles, and all clothing during parties or ceremonies fully absorbs the deep sense of beauty and self-care.

It is not simply feminine vanity.

Feeling or “being” (in a photograph) beautiful compensates and balances all the frustrations that embitter everyday life.

It is a proud and powerful scream of femininity, which acquires a highly symbolic value like many other psychological practices in the daily lives of migrant communities in Italy.

What seems a trifle for us, for those who live far from their country and family, from dear friends, from small gestures made every day, become an undertow of happiness and medicines for nostalgia.

This is why it has been and remains for me a privilege to be the mirror of their vanity.

Because photography is not only a way to emphasize their beauty – whether it is true or assumed – but it is also a way to lessen the grip of nostalgia.

Looking at oneself in one's own image is not reducible to Narcissus observing himself on the mirror of the water, but it is something that is also beyond all the speeches made at the beginning, on the duty to please and on being acted by cultural models or by the desires of the man: this happens outside the edges of the photograph, to quote Wittgenstein.

In that rectangle (of private sense) there is only the woman who looks and confirms to herself that, despite everything, she is still happy to be what she has become. Selfishly happy.”

 

Tanuja was just one of the first foreign women I portrayed, and I did not yet know that a simple photograph can become a wide-open door to an entire country and its culture.

Long hair is enough to feed curiosity to know the history and richness of her country of origin.

And even more, I did not imagine how an innocent smile at your camera can be a precious medicine for nostalgia.

Empathy

Vittorio square. Rome, 20 June 2009

My last book was the Asian Tales collection, which luckily readers loved, with six stories of women from six different countries in Asia.

Many have asked me how I managed to write so deeply from a woman's point of view, from her head.

I certainly have no recipe; I just know that I have been doing it since I was a child. Observe people and try to understand what their lives are like, and what they feel, developing a strong instinct and empathy.

As a dear friend of mine teacher in Malaysia said to her students in a lesson: “We don't want sympathy, we want empathy.”

This elderly woman, I think Indian, was sitting in front of me right in the center of the Piazza Vittorio market.

Lost in her thoughts, she didn't even notice that I was photographing her.

I took three shots, one from further away, and then zoomed in on this last one which is my favorite.

As if the movement of the approaching target was my empathic charge: almost wanting to enter her mind, to read what bent her face furrowed by her wrinkles to the ground.

Empathy is the fundamental gift – for me – for a good portrait, because it makes closeness possible and allows you to understand, first, if a person wants to be photographed or not.

In one form, the portrait is always a kind of violence. It is the imposition of our gaze on someone who doesn't even know who we are.

And if they do not realize it, the violence is even stronger, because it is the overcoming of their loneliness.

The only extenuating circumstance, therefore, remains the intention and love.

I am convinced, not to deceive that sense of violence, that, as many peoples believe, photography not only steals the soul but can also pull away the loneliness, and take on the sadness, if only for the momentary sharing of the click.

I will never know what that old woman felt at that moment, what pain or tiredness, but I believe that in this photograph there are traces of it that have alleviated part of that pain.

I know, it's a stupid dream. But that's also what I think today.

In this image, I can now read the evolutionary path of my empathy.

 

Italian version