Everyone is a photographer.
I stop at a traffic light in Rome, and a boy comes up selling a bunch of roses:
“Hi, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a photographer”.
“You call that a job? Everyone takes pictures”.
Everyone carries a camera in their pocket, nowadays: to take a picture, you just brush a screen with your finger. Yet the meaning of photography is not in the point of view, but in the vision. The vision generating the picture; the vision the picture conveys.
Reality already comes down in myriads of concentric and self-referential streams of representation – self-portraits on social networks, or the standardized vintage look of hipstamatic. Vision is where photography can find a new, original dimension, where new meanings crop up from the combination of impossible elements.
Each project must construct a new world, in the strictest, manual meaning of construction. In every project, be it personal or commissioned, each visual element is crafted into the setting with utmost attention to detail. The message, or the product, is positioned inside a photographic setting specifically constructed for and around it.
Nor does this imply any rejection of the latest digital post-production techniques. Their potential is actually expanded and enhanced by the subject’s material relevance: message relates with place, product with person, in a physical object which can then be digitally handled with no loss to its material essence.
In each step of the process, from sketches of the idea to the lay-out’s design, preparing and constructing the set, and then post-production, the vision gradually develops, not only through the lenses, but in the photographer’s own hands.
The aesthetics of handicraft evolves into a new visual ethics: hand-made visions.