Somehow it all starts with a memory I have of my early childhood, when one day, walking with my father in the Bari downtown, a southern Italian city and my place of birth, I saluted an old man who crossed my path to which he replied with a cordial smile.
I couldn’t have been older than 4 years old at the time.

Children have a different understanding than most adults about life and their fellow humans.
Children tend to go with the flow and their openness and lack of judgement allows them to feel life’s energy flowing through their veins.

After many years of producing images depicting landscapes, cityscapes and portraits, last year I have felt the urge to go on the streets and capture people’s life, to portray the crowd in moments of self-absorptions in order to get those precious moments where the ubiquitous mask reveals the person in its many facets.
It has been and it still is challenging work and one that pushes me to restrict my zone of comfort as, in order to get some valuable images, many times one must push away the fear associated with capturing moments when people believe are not observed.
In the beginning, the part of me who wanted to preserve that comfort zone presented itself with ethical questions.
Who was I to invade the privacy of these people whom I didn’t even know?
Would I one day take a picture of the wrong person and end up to the hospital, or worse?
Are people going to think I am some kind of pervert as I point the camera at a child?
These questions and others were engulfing my mind as i tried to point the camera at my subjects.
It was a struggle and many times this thoughts delayed or stopped altoghether my actions.

But then something happened.
One day, as the bus was approaching the site by me designated to shoot for the day, I felt a childlike anticipation and joy was erupting from every pore. That child that said hello to the old man in Bari was out, he wanted to feel Life streaming through his veins again and the camera once again, as it has been in my past 28 years, was the tool of choice.
That feeling was the beginning of the understanding for this strong need to get in the crowd, I felt I still needed more answers but that joy justified enough for the moment my perseverance of this activity.
The shooting got easier, although some moments of fear and timidness still surfaced every now and then, especially when I started to ask myself another question.
Do you think it’s right to depict these people just because you want to take pictures? What is your excuse?
I put my own shoulders to the wall.

I am old enough to know that to use reason to answer questions that involve morals or ethics only results in rationalizations and that we have to wait for them to get to us from somewhere far, be it outside of ourselves or right to the core of our being,
I went back to my photography books of people like Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank, Kertesz and Winogrand, I looked at the images of these masters and gradually I understood that what made me feel that what I was doing was wrong was judgement.
It was that critic inside me who was being silenced at the moment of taking a picture, ready to come back as I put my camera in my camera bag.
Risking to sound corny, I realized that when judgement is silenced that empty space gets filled with total acceptance of the surroundings and every nuance of reality is an aspect of Life and Beauty is always present and willing to be plucked. and this is the essence of what is called (erroneously) street photography.

These are very exciting times for me as this new way has revatilized my love for photography but more importantly for the world we live in.
The world is beautiful, even in the places where social conventions tell us there is only ugliness, whatever that means.
Just as we can say that we love a person only when we accept their dark side, the same goes for all other things.

To see more of my images of this project, please, visit my New Work gallery.

The good, the bad and the ugly as one

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