Barona
Photography
DATE
COMMISSION
LOCATION
It was late February when I started shooting, and in this first roll of 36 poses is the first instinctive impression of what had interested me about the Barona area that I circumscribed by photographing it.
I had settled there for about a month and after some time I had gone walking in the area of the rice fields that someone local had pointed out to me as a nice walk. As usual, I didn't have my camera with me. It was there that I saw the social housing building that prompted me to begin this photographic work, so I returned a few weeks later with the camera I managed to find for the occasion. I also took some time to decide whether to use black and white film (as I had done in my last works) or color. When I started shooting, it was sunny in the Milanese winter.
What struck me, I think, was the silence around this building, where in the following days I tried to get closer and closer, I admit with circumspection and caution, because in some previous walks, of inspection, I could see a certain diffidence and harshness in the language and in the looks of some tenants who were down in the surrounding squares. In the first roll, I didn't have time to establish some dialogue with the building's residents. I shot stealthily. I usually try, after becoming familiar with the environment to take a few portraits, a few anyway. The weather changed in the following days, preparing for the snowfall that then arrived; I managed to finish the film before the landscape whitened and I didn't have a chance to take more shots there.
I had settled there for about a month and after some time I had gone walking in the area of the rice fields that someone local had pointed out to me as a nice walk. As usual, I didn't have my camera with me. It was there that I saw the social housing building that prompted me to begin this photographic work, so I returned a few weeks later with the camera I managed to find for the occasion. I also took some time to decide whether to use black and white film (as I had done in my last works) or color. When I started shooting, it was sunny in the Milanese winter.
What struck me, I think, was the silence around this building, where in the following days I tried to get closer and closer, I admit with circumspection and caution, because in some previous walks, of inspection, I could see a certain diffidence and harshness in the language and in the looks of some tenants who were down in the surrounding squares. In the first roll, I didn't have time to establish some dialogue with the building's residents. I shot stealthily. I usually try, after becoming familiar with the environment to take a few portraits, a few anyway. The weather changed in the following days, preparing for the snowfall that then arrived; I managed to finish the film before the landscape whitened and I didn't have a chance to take more shots there.
