My photography journey

Photography is certainly not a new thing for me. I started taking snapshots of the things around me when Adobe Photoshop CS4 was still around with a compact digital camera which I received as a gift when my relatives saw my interest in photography. Before that, I had a plastic-lens compact film camera.

Photography was always something "latent" in my life. I didn't put lots of thought into that art. To be fair: I had the basis of composition, knowledge of the exposure triangle, and maybe some lucky shots here and there. I didn't have a photography genre that caught my interest, and some other things in my life filled the "mental bandwidth" I could dedicate to photography.

I then moved to Turin from a small town in Abruzzo. At that moment, something kicked in. Suddenly, I started to pay attention to colors, shapes, and light around me, and I felt the need to capture what I was seeing, the moments around me.

One of the first things I bought after moving was a DSLR camera. It was a commitment, something I had on my shelf that reminded me of taking some pictures here and there. The most important thing was regaining confidence with that tool and slowly taking some steps into the world with that shiny new toy.

With that new toy, I started taking pictures of landmarks around the city (yeah, I'm not proud of every photo I took, but some came out lucky, and I still like them to this day). There's a limited number of landmarks in a city, and it started to become boring. I was worried about the money I spent on something that didn't give me the joy I was expecting. Then something clicked (pun intended). What if I had people as subjects?

That was the bloom of what I'm photographing today. I took pictures of people in urban typesettings, but something didn't feel right. What was I doing? What "story" am I trying to tell? It turns out that people only have a pre-defined set of actions they do in public, at least here in Turin. I had to find another way to keep shooting.

At this point, I started seeing photography in another light. What I had was this tool that allowed me to capture the interaction between light and objects. What if I used this interaction as the subject of my pictures? My current iteration is keeping individuals anonymized by the environment, using existing light to provide contrast in the parts I want to highlight. I started to produce darker images, and, for now, this is my happy place.

I still have a lot to learn about this art. I'm pretty confident that the practice of taking pictures is here to stay for me. I share my photos on Instagram Stories at the moment, but I want to build an archive on this site as soon as possible.

I'm curious about what will be my next step.