I start with nothing and I try to make something of it. That’s all.
Sometimes I get too serious and transcendent about my work, but to say the truth (or at least something truer), taking photographs is the only way I’ve found to take my way-to-perfect-and- way-too-rigid-to- be- real inner child out to play.
He doesn’t care a shit about framing or lighting. He sees Mickey Mouse where the Aesthete sees walls to paint. He goes for love and wonder hunt and I should follow him more often in his shy, yet powerful desire to begin now, again, all over, from pure scratch.

As a photographer, I’ve come to realize that certain emotions are invisible to eyes in immediate reality, but they appear, so uncanny familiar, so violent, so touching, once revealed in a photograph. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be if I couldn’t keep record of the overlooked, if I couldn’t stay a minute mindfully, compassionately connected with all the disowned selves of mine that show up in brief encounters, in relationships of no more than half of a minute.
What would my life be like if I couldn’t touch the spent threads of the past interweaved in the silken clothes of present. What kind of person would I be, unaware of the subtle evidence of human suffering meeting me at the borders of a shot?
Photography lets me feel the chill of winter on the skin and in the soul of strangers, and gives me a glimpse of their lives as a whole. It makes me aware and pushes me through the thickness of thought, more open, more available, much more tender and humble. And most of all, more careful and insightful, both qualities without which no photographer can evolve to what others call genius, and I suspect it’s the consistent choice to follow inner truth and inner knowingness, wherever they take us, whatever the moment we are meant to freeze so others can seize what really happens, what really happened and even foretell what is about to happen, beyond any attempt of self-definition.

(*) Quote by Theodore Roethke.

I humbly and faithfully cherish a lodge of mentors, most of them gone: the tutelary spirits of photography. One of the members of this lodge is Robert Capa, who said that if a photo is mediocre or lifeless, you weren’t close enough. That’s the reason why I often cross the same line that cross stalkers, voyeurs and exhibitionists.
I’m a shy, discreet man, but the need to capture life naked and off guard gives me the arrogance, the boldness, the immodesty necessary to do my best with the only precious talent I think I’ve got.

If I had charted the map of life before my forty somethings I would have placed quiet waters and true love in the far side of virgin territories.
As she appeared, all the things that I had been bereaved of found name and definition, as well as a bunch of minor neurosis that serve the purpose of holding reality tight and manageable.
Photography is some kind of portable memory device, but also an organic extension of desire, endearment and anxiety.
In one scene of Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, the character played by Samantha Morton opens a photo album, which holds the most precious moments of her life, the laughter of her lost parents, the enlightened eyes of the ones she gave smuggled ‘papers’ – sort of thumb sized chipsets granting freedom in a futuristic hyper-controlled world-, risking her own life. She says: Their faces are so beautiful, their eyes, their facial expressions’ and touches the album delighted in the warmly- embracing halo of past gone.
The album was not a video album, but an ordinary one, able to enhance the triggering of powerful emotional accounts. It was a tiny, thin album, compact and abridged. A summary of joy and feelings worthwhile remembering.
Sooner or later we will reach a tipping point, a harshly controlled global status. Emotions will be replaced with rules and the supreme act of rebellion will be to express love, intense convictions and feelings. We are doomed, we are playing with fire and numbing ourselves in order to avoid the responsibility that comes along with freedom. Huxley’s Brave New World, The Sphynx and Gattaca are not that implausible.
When those cold and unfeeling times arrive, my dynamic photo album will store a few photos of my daughters while they were discovering life, Delia’s feet dancing in quiet, peaceful waters and one of my young, bewildered and be-good-enough years. My girls’ photos to stay alive, my own portrait to remember I can survive.