ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a photographer. As much as a painter is an artist and not anyone who applies paint on a surface; as much as a chef is a chef and not any cook; as much as a computer programmer is as such and not anyone who uses a computer.

I state this with all due respect to cooks et al.: my mother is a gifted cook, but she has never wanted to become a chef. It is not, in fact, a matter of artistry or ability: for me, it is a matter of intention and communication, that is, the artist is whom who intends to communicate through artistic means and thinking to a larger public than herself or his inner circle.

 

I am a photographer. Because photography is the tool I know how to use in order to express myself, the one that is always available to me, and the one I desire.

It puzzles me that the common perception is that of a medium we have already mastered and whose potential has been completely unfolded. Maybe when holographic technology will become mass-available, photography will finally be able to go abstract! It took some 40,000 years to painting to free itself from the burning human desire for representation: precisely it took from cave art to the invention of photography, which happened circa 250 years ago.

 

I am a photographer because I believe in art. I believe that art, or better, thinking artistically, is the most vital function of mankind: not that it actually helps you to stay alive. But it makes you want to stay alive.

Without art in all its declinations – beauty, hope, chance, resistance, failure, freedom, magic, death, desire, obsession, torment, fetish, cure, progress, vision, warning, dream, emotion, love – why would we eat, drink, sleep, work and procreate? We need reasons to survive…

 

I am a person ultimately. But, in my case, I am a person because I am a photographer. And I am a photographer because I am an artist.