Venice portrait #03, 1999 Print

Maybe it was 1986 when they gave me the first camera, a shiny red Halina. Since then I have started to look at the world through different eyes. I still remember many years earlier I came across one of those tourist gadgets in the shape of a toy camera that projects tourist images of a certain place into the optical viewfinder with every click. Surprising, it was love at first sight.In 1988 I took it more seriously by attending the Italian Fashion photography school in Genoa. So my interest in photography began in the late 1980s with the amazing and fascinating film development technique and black and white printing in the darkroom, to then tune into new digital technologies. I also love to express my style through the Holga toy camera and the pinhole camera, analog and digital. Toy Holga cameras with a meniscus lens, made of plastic or glass; the lens is full of chromatic aberration and vignetting, the camera is at risk of light infiltration. The plastic lens produces images of low contrast and sharpness compared to glass. The glass lens in any case, as for the plastic lens, has a strong and progressive loss of quality that is distributed from the center towards the edges. But they offer a perspective that looks natural and pleasing to the eye. This is due to the meniscus optical scheme. The overall result is an image of plastic, muffled, dreamlike, retro and full of atmosphere. I make my photographs even with pinhole cameras, because I find the image of an extraordinary purity; the light is not filtered and contaminated by the lens. In the history of photography, the camera obscura certainly represented the first experimented method, having as its purpose a more precise and prospectively correct reproduction of reality. Photography has very ancient origins and its ancient path opens thanks to numerous experiments in the field of optics, with careful observations linked to a particular astronomical phenomenon such as the solar eclipse and a need linked to perspective reproduction in the field of art and architecture. In its form, a dark room is equivalent to a dark room, where, on a wall, there is a small hole (pinhole) from which the light penetrates which, on the opposite wall, projects the upside-down and inverted image, present to the 'external.