Project Description
My trip to Paris begins from Montmartre, as I was captivated by the 360-degree view of the city. In front of that spectacle, I feel small and almost overwhelmed by so much beauty, but there I realized that I did not want to tell about the iconic and well-known Paris; instead, I wanted” to tell about the life of Parisians, the everyday life, made up of small refined boutiques, little stores filled with vintage objects and clothes, typical brasseries, boulangeries with the smell of freshly baked baguettes.
It was a long journey in which I represented diversity, extravagance, peculiarities; walking around the city, scrutinized places, men, women, losing myself in the reflections of those particular encounters. Each one seemed to carry with him his story, his dreams, sufferings and happiness, all his experience; people appeared to me alive in the deepest sense of the word, real.
Live in Paris gets us lost in the meanders of that inscrutable and intangible essence that runs through the French capital, but it surfaces in the stories I wanted to tell. Honorè de Balzac represented Paris as a bottomless ocean; I wanted to represent this literary image with a kind of visual vertigo contained in all the aesthetic-formal fragments in the book.
Underlying all the micro-stories told is the synesthesia of poetry that makes these photographs an intimate symbolic formula of an ever-changing city. I wanted to enact a narrative and interpretive imagery made up of places, things, and people, which come alive in scenes that are both icastic and achievable in the endless sequence of images that is life.
I let myself be amazed by everything the city could offer me, I let myself be enchanted by the colors, the dynamism of people, the ironic and unusual intersections.
To do this I was largely helped by my artistic-cultural references, namely Wenders, Lynch, Tuymans, Bacon, Freud. But also Sartre, Proust, Balzac, so empathy, projection, imagination: these are the formulas I used to feed my gaze almost overwhelmed by chance encounters in the streets teeming with life, visual poetry and intimate narrative light.
It was cathartic, for my soul and my eyes, to dive into this ocean and travel it without being able to find the bottom. Paris made me realize that no matter how great the care one takes in traversing it, in describing it, no matter how numerous and interesting the explorers of this sea, “one will always find there a virgin place, an unknown place populated by flowers, pearls, monsters; something unheard of, in short, forgotten by divers literary visitors.” A quote that reminds us once again how Paris is an enchanting and inexhaustible source of inspiration, which is why it is impossible to unveil and know all the way.