"Lingering Past" is a project that reveals a personal direction. It’s a vision of the land that saw me grow, filtered through the emotions created by a new awareness of losses from my childhood.
It’s a journal of memories, translated into photographic images, where the desire for a simpler life, at a personal and social level, is made evident by the choices of subjects, composition, tonalities and the general mood used in creating the images.
Looking through the ground glass of my camera, I came to realize that this centuries old architecture, defying time and made even more beautiful by the elements was acting on me as a mirror: it allowed me to reach areas of my past experiences through the human dimension that emanated.
Similarly, covering urban areas and landscapes that I was photographing, I began to understand that the past revealed in those old man-made structures, were raising questions of an existential nature.
How far did we stray from our nature in the act of surrender to progress, consumerism, technology?
Is this an inevitable process that it will push us to adapt, or is our essence immutable, always in need of the human dimension, necessary to grow in a more balanced manner?
And if that is true, do we have an understanding of the magnitude of the conflict that lives inside of us?
Where the title "Lingering Past" in the personal interpretation suggests a psychological journey encouraged by the warmth and familiarity of the environment, in the socio-cultural sense, sees the obstinate evidence of the past as a powerful anchor in tension with the present.
This project has been executed in a life span of ten years. Throughout this decade, my need to represent the images through different shooting and printing techniques has shifted. Since I see the print as the final interpretation of the scene, strictly influenced by a constant change in my capacity to “understand” the subject, so the look and the moods of the works have undergone through changes.
I see the photography free of constraints. To have forced myself to give to this project an appearance of cohesiveness would have prevented that freedom that is imperative on how I see the creative process.
LINGERING PAST
