Since I got into photography in the late 90’s, my interest was equally aimed at the most ordinary aspects of daily life, the traces of the human passage, and the impact it made to the surrounding environment.
Sometimes this search was pursued by documenting a specific subject matter, though just as often it was accomplished by collecting those random finds I constantly stumbled upon.
In 2015 I published my first book ‘Minor Collisions’, by L’Artiere Edizioni and part of the Urbanautica Collections.
About ‘Proper holidays’:
So she said – “I want to go on vacation”.
– “What do you mean?”
– “I mean ‘proper holidays’, not a photographic trip of some sort”.
My previous long-term project ‘Minor Collisions’ was mostly about me moving to a huge, overwhelming place – London – and trying to give a different sense of scale to the research I had been pursuing until then in my hometown in Italy.
But that was a familiar place, also, and the documentary side of the project became more and more relevant as it progressed: it didn’t take me long to get an idea, even a very vague one, of what I was looking for.
After completing that project, I kept thinking about how could I push it even further, and this trip to Japan immediately looked like the opportunity I was waiting for: I was going to spend a few weeks in a place I didn’t know in the slightest, a very complex one, so much that it would have been very easy to get lost there.
I didn’t take part in the planning part, and that was precisely the kind of game I wanted to play: anywhere was good to me, anywhere was new. Going there with a list of the images I wanted to bring back home would have been pointless. This had to be all about chance instead, ending up in a collection of bits and pieces, taken as soon as they revealed themselves.
