intorno a ferragosto qualche giorno con un polistirolo bianco in centro a milano, con la voglia di far vedere gli strani personaggi che lo frequentano, quando tutti gli altri sono in vacanza.

il presuntuoso tentativo di fondere i due giganti dei ritratti in location: august sander e il richard avedon dell’ “in the american west”. (che arroganza, solo avvicinarmi a questi due maestri!)

l’idea di fare una specie di “spoon river” dei vivi, con un rappresentante di ogni categoria: il pazzo, lo sfigato, la figa, il borghese, la mamma…

una delle prime volte che il “corriere della sera” dedica una pagina intera ad un servizio fotografico.

un video backstage.

mi piace molto fare ritratti in giro: si parla con le persone…

la famiglia soulama

melissa ed igor

vittorio

carolina

aldo

josè

claudio e giada

ida

francesco e mattia

michela e francesco

massimo

raffaele

la famiglia lemmonier

raffaele e cristian

la famiglia longo

la famiglia rama

lo

giuseppe

la famiglia vedder

vito

cristiana

zicari e stanghi

rachel e emmanuel

nicola

la famiglia davtyan

a beautiful girl

and a beautiful boy

They meet

They touch

They kiss

They hold each other

They fuck

But then they fight

She, as she was, runs away

He remains, alone and desperate

He begins trying on her wig and going through her cupboard

He tries her clothes on

Until he cancels himself out.

Disappears.

And becomes her

I do not like the holidays.

Most of the people hold on for the holidays to relax, to do what they don’t get to do during the year, and perhaps above all to think up an alternative to spend their daily lives, to their work. Bullshit. There isn’t an alternative way to our job. Our lives is what we do every day.

And do you want to know something? What we do in our lives is exactly what we have decide to do. You work at the post office but you’d like to be a rockstar? It’s not true, what you’d really like to do is to work at the post office. Also because to be a rockstar is not really all that simple and glamorous as it seems: always be young, be on tour playing every night the same set, sleeping every night in a different hotel, the adrenalin flying up and down like a roller coaster…

To complain about work, agonising the holidays, it’s a comfortable and quick shortcut to delude yourself in having a plan B, not being aware that there is only plan A.

A few weeks ago I was over hearing two young men in a bar, they were competing on who accumulated more holidays: “I have three weeks!” “I’ve also got three weeks, but if I add the ones from last year of which I didn’t benefit I get to four!!!”. Not understanding that the more they boasted about the more they were shouting how unsatisfied with what they were doing. You don’t like your job: change it! Instead you don’t, you do not want to change it.

I often think about those people that do the holidays always in a precise way,  and then stay in the traffic during the week, then they move onto the weekend traffic, to head over to places with a lot of traffic for christmas and end up in sardinia in August in the traffic: they always move, and in the end they are always in the same place with the same people.

To me holidays is to be suspended. Like this image that I took this morning. While you are at the sea, traveling, on a boat, on the mountains… I love soaring above milan, sunny and deserted, looking at her from afar, listening to her silence, immersing myself in her shadows…

Not being able and not wanting to take the only possible holiday: this one

The tpw week has come to an end. It is very difficult to write about this experience. I am only going to say that this is one thing everyone should do, especially and above everyone else individuals that are not photographers.

As a matter of fact we never speak about photography, we speak for days and for twenty hours a day on how to be able to speak about ourselves in a transparent way and perhaps sincere, on how to walk on the edge of the abyss which takes us on the path to break down that boundary which keeps us from flying away.

I would have a thousands things to tell you, a thousand phrases (marmo, ddc, d, b, m…), thousand words, thousand laughters, thousand tears. It is difficult though, impossible. It is maybe better to leave some space for toni’s words, whom he honoured us with his presence. Or with francesca’s story.

Even better perhaps is to leave some space for the images done by my “seven capital someones”, my seven wonderful students (one has to love his students, so that empathy connects…) which have done seven wonderful projects.

Lets leave some space to their images:

all done with iphone

not dead, alive stop

full in TPW stop

Without any coverage stop

Track of the week “winter call” by kula shaker stop

Phrase of the week by the super sicilian calogero “to be perfect you are only missing one defect: me” stop

We are loosing at volleyball stop

Little photos, retouches and text all done on the iphone from the square centimeter where there is reception stop

Tears and blood stop

“I have always been as I am also when I wasn’t as I am and nobody will ever know who I am because I am not only as I am”

patrizia valduga

This blog adheres to the strike for means of communication against the gag law. (anyways I didn’t have much to say…)

One of the few, serious and concrete possibilities for a young photographer to get noticed: the canon competition for young photographers, created in partnership with milan’s spazio forma.

You not only win wicked cash, but a marvelous showcase as well.

The jury, almost all of high quality, is there to maintain an authoritative and balanced judgment. the judges are: the adverts director francesco nencini, the director of 24 magazine fernanda roggero, the photo editor for marie claire emanuela mirebelli, the general director of the triennale andrea cancellato and the winner of the canon prize andrea frazzetta, all of this under the authoritative supervision of denis curti.

This is the prestigious jury. I wrote “almost all” because there is one judge missing, a certain settimio benedusi. The others are serious people and incorruptible. He is not! He can be corrupted for a loaf of bread, for a book that has already been read, for an old movie on a scratched DVD, for a LP for which is impossible to find a listener, for a cassette tape that didn’t work already in 1985, for an expired roll of film, for a marzipan gondola, for a crystal swallow, for a gift voucher for a small tattoo of a dolphin on the ankle, for a subscription to hunting & fishing, for the complete DVD collection of amici, for.. Anything!

So: participate, sign up in great numbers, and corrupt (only benedusi though)