"I am about to venture into a romantic field, where man and nature rule side by side and each makes the other meaningful and interesting" just like the painter Ludwig Richter, I too seek a long-lost symbiosis between nature and culture.
The more time passes, the more I realise that nostalgia is a preminent theme in my work. I would have enjoyed living in the 1800s as an artist on the Grand Tour: suspended in an evocative time with every landscape providing an uncontaminated view in my quest for a sublime feeling of disarming beauty.
I enjoy change, the idea that a mutation has taken place and that the world, which was once inhabitable and cognizable, has magically turned ancient and unknown. I think back to a day when I saw a partial solar eclipse and, as that extraordinary light generated a feeling of irrepressible euphoria, in the solitude of the photographic lens everything became more clear, crystal clear, but most of all, more original and magical.
Through my liberal arts studies I have definitely been influenced by the Italian Renaissance, but I believe that the only way forward is to find connections between all known representations and cultural models in a constant dialogue made up of gestures of recognition and subtle nuances.
I want the premise of my photography to be a state of need, an ethical commitment capable of providing temporary appeasement, allowing a face or a place to become recognizable, familiar, and inhabitable. The photography I seek does not violate, judge, hide or transform, as seeing is an act of magic that needs levity and transparency, rather than weighty technology. I am horrified by the insensitivity of reportage photography and the excessive flawlessness of a hyper-professional eye. Rather, I seek a fresh, small scale approach with my 35mm lens and I try to impose on the outside world a sort of visual editing that will always reveal small and intimate private universes. I would like my photography to shed light on the premise of a construction, of a job performed on the basis of an overall script or canvas.
I always start with a project in mind, but this must never be rigidly defined; it must be open to intuition and chance encounters. This cross-cutting that is a kind of montage resembles the construction methods of mosaics or puzzles. It is important to show that, although the overall image comes together only at the end, every single image must be self-sufficient and valid in its own right. Lined up, one after the other, these photographs of houses and landscapes, together with those of faces and gestures, create an unusual sequence, a sort of fortune telling, or divination reading, where every figure and couple reveal the secret understanding of a story or destiny.
I have always dealt with the "scene to be portrayed" directly and positioned myself face to face with events, avoiding cuts or flights of any type. I primarily use normal lenses; I don’t like showing which lenses I have used for, as Luigi Ghirri says, "The true lens has always been something other than an optical lens."
I believe that eyesight is humankind’s most overrated sense and that melancholy and fear often occur because we see "too much". I believe that the duty of photography is to build images and pictures so that photographing the world becomes a way to understand and shape it.
Through fragments and intuitions, small light mutations, the residue of a colour, the detail of a façade and the lines on a face or an unexpected space, photography can transform all these things into small certainties... en ensemble of small constellations to be connected in order to trace a possible itinerary.
Emanuele Torti,
September 2013