It's ok to subtract, but subtract for what?
One of the things that I understood by taking photographs is that those who compare painting with photography are wrong.
It is one of those clichés to which everyone believes because it is easy to understand; for example the idea that the astronauts inside the International Space Station live in the absence of gravity.
You see them fluttering in all directions and it's easy think that there is not gravity at all, but the reality is that gravity is as strong there as on Earth (otherwise the entire space station would escape at ludicrous speed away from the Earth).
Simply the ISS constantly falls towards the planet crust, but it's so fast that its trajectory does allow it to crash. Instead it just falls over the Earth curvature so it orbit around the planet giving the astronauts the sensation of living at 0G.
Sorry, I digressed. In case you have not noticed it, I often ramble.
Photography, as I was about to say, is much more similar to sculpture than painting, because it is a subtractive form of art.
If you are a painter you know very well that everything starts from a white surface or in any case from something you consider to be "void" and that to get the expected result you have to add lines, colors, materials. You have a space and you have to fill it. If your name is Lucio Fontana you can also cut the space, but in this case you are adding cuts and even more space.
A sculpture, on the other hand, starts from a more or less regular block of a certain material from which one must remove mass in the right places to obtain a statue or a mold. If you make mistakes even a little one, then everything is to be thrown away, you have to start again.
The same is true in photography, at least most of the times.
Whether it's a staged situation or a landscape, the starting point is always that huge mess that our eyes perceive and we call reality. Of all this entropy we have to choose a portion to include in our frame and we must be sure that it does not contain disturbing elements or shapes non-functional to the story we want to tell. If we make a mistake, the whole image is ruined, we have to redo it.
But there is one element that unites all forms of art that is absolutely essential: from music to acting, from literature to architecture, what transforms craftsmanship into art is only and exclusively "the reason why you are doing it". The message you want to give, the feeling you want to convey, the story you want to tell.
A urinal in a toilet is a urinal. A urinal put on display by Duchamp is a work of art just because Duchamp had a purpose in doing so, a message tell.
That time I arrived on the icy beach
All the previous reasoning has always been clear to me and one day almost without wanting it I could put into practice this stream of consciousness bringing me to realise the series of photographs that, in part, you are bout to see below.
I was on this [beach in Ireland] (http://www.visitachill.com/en/beaches.html) and although it was August it was cold as hell (ironically) and yet there were people who bathed like it was nothing, so I immediately realized I was the weirdo.
Anyway, dressed as Roald Amundsen at the South Pole, I took place on that sand and at the beginning what struck me were the colors and the clouds that were reflected on a wide shoreline as smooth as a pool table.
But then a sense of peace and solitude took over as I explored the surrounding space with a wide angle and while I was shooting I realized that all the people who were swarming on the sand could disappear if I wanted and if only I had waited long enough despite the cold.
I wanted to tell how the place, beautiful but also inhospitable, made me feel tiny, like the figures that I chose to record on my images.
Enjoy
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