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A Waiter in via Sardegna
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Inside The Palace of Power
I took this photograph inside a government building, in the afternoon, when the corridors echo in silence and the light is all reflected memory. The image focuses on a phone—old-style, maroon, hanging uselessly from its hook—framed by dark wood panels and infinite reflections. It’s a cliché of power, really: opulence, silence, and an obsolete instrument of control. The technical conditions weren’t ideal. I had no tripod, the light was dim and uneven, and I was working with a handheld digital camera not built for low-light finesse. ISO had to go up, and with it came the noise. But I decided not to clean it. Grain, in this case, felt appropriate.…
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Trial Docks Waiting for the Justice to Come
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Final Arrangements Before the Hearing
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Outside the Courthall
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Behind the Glass
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Arrested Behind the Door
Photographing in the criminal court of Rome is a peculiar experience — the air is thick with bureaucracy and human tension, yet most of it plays out behind closed doors. In this frame, the door is both a literal and symbolic barrier: clean, almost featureless, save for the taped sheet of paper outlining the rules of entry. It is stark in its message: access to the waiting room for the arrested is only permitted to lawyers, and only upon proof of formal appointment. Everything else — the people, their stories, their anxiety — remains hidden. From a compositional standpoint, I kept the framing tight and frontal. The geometry of the…
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Room 17 – VIXI
The steel doors of Aula 17 stand closed, expressionless. Matte black, scratched, impassive. Above them, a bureaucratic sign: 7ᵃ Sezione, Edificio B. On the right, a board once meant to list names and hearings is now empty—washed clean by time or intention. Seventeen is an unlucky number in Italy. Rearranged, the Roman numerals XVII form VIXI—”I have lived”, an epitaph. And so, Room 17 becomes more than a courtroom. It becomes a threshold. A place where the living confront endings. The end of freedom. The end of illusions. Sometimes, the end of justice itself. The symmetry of the composition tightens the tension. Every element is locked in place. Nothing moves, and nothing is random.…
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Legal Apartheid
Two elevators, side by side, divided not by function but by status. On the left, a small sign reads Pubblico. On the right, Avvocati. Between them, a strip of blank wall holds the call buttons and a standard notice: Non usare in caso di incendio. The symmetry is perfect, the contrast sharper for it. In the Court of Rome, this arrangement makes practical sense. Lawyers must move quickly between hearings; delays can derail the fragile timetable of justice. Efficiency demands a separate lift. And yet, looking at it here—reduced to a flat, black-and-white composition—the logic fades, and something else emerges. The brushed steel doors are marked with smudges and fingerprints, traces of the…
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Guest Are Welcome!
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Red Bag, Black Shoes
This frame was taken at street level, quite literally. I crouched, waiting for the traffic to pause, and caught her mid-stride—ankle exposed, bag swinging low, oblivious to the lens just metres away. The choice of crop was deliberate. I wanted anonymity, but not detachment. By excluding the face, the image becomes less about the individual and more about the semiotics of presence—gesture, attire, movement, and the way we carve out identity with things. The red bag dominates the composition, not just chromatically but structurally. Its synthetic gloss, reptilian texture, and almost architectural form turn it into a visual anchor. It’s loud, assertive, unapologetic. And then, in counterpoint, the black shoes—quiet,…
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A Lamppost
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Life Within the Post Office
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@ Rome’s Maker Faire – 6. Lost In Texting
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Not Sure I Would Like The Feel
There’s something both fascinating and faintly unsettling about this photograph. At first glance, it’s a familiar object — a double bass, resting in its case, warm varnished wood catching the light. But then the eye meets the alien appendages: an elaborate framework of carbon-fibre rods, clamps, and actuators, bolted to the instrument’s body. Tradition and craft meet machine logic here, in a way that’s almost confrontational. From a compositional standpoint, the photographer has made a decisive choice to fill the frame with the instrument, anchoring it in the lower half while allowing the vertical lines of the robotic structure to carry the gaze upwards. The background, populated with drums, flight…
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Reluctant
It is a simple gesture, easily missed. But in that tension between movement and resistance lies a deeper reading of emotion and instinct. The dog, powerful and proud, lowers its head and anchors its weight as if reluctant to proceed—not from fear, but perhaps from nostalgia, uncertainty, or simply the inertia of old age. There is a moment of friction in this otherwise ordinary urban vignette: the human strides forward, while the dog—the loyal shadow, the constant companion—glances back, hesitates, drags its paws against the direction of motion. The leash, loosely held, is not a tool of command but a symbolic tether. It binds not through force, but through trust.…
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Ottica Boncompagni
Walking through the streets of Rome with a camera in hand, I often find that shopfronts—particularly those that stubbornly resist the homogenisation of modern branding—tell more about a city’s cultural fabric than any monument. Ottica Boncompagni, captured here in this image, is a perfect example. The sign is visually loud, unapologetically retro, and absolutely Roman. The heavy, rounded typography in ochre and crimson recalls a distinctly 1970s aesthetic—an era of optimism and visual experimentation that still clings to the façades of certain Roman quartieri. And yet, this is not kitsch. It’s lived-in design, aged not by affectation but by time and endurance. From a technical perspective, the composition sits squarely…
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A Grocery Store in Rome
Some photographs emerge not from the pursuit of the exceptional, but from the quiet insistence of the everyday. This frame, captured in Rome, is one of them. I didn’t wait for decisive moments or orchestrate elements. I simply stood in front of this unassuming mini market, with its fluorescent signage blinking “COLD DRINKS” and “APERTO,” and let the banality speak. The storefront is wedged into a stone facade, a brutal contrast softened by the cluttered joy of cheap pleasures: laminated posters of ice creams, fizzy drinks stacked like bricks, and a faded theatre poster wedged between glossy wrappers. You can almost smell the dusty coolness inside — a refuge from…
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A Blue Vespa
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@Rome Maker Faire – 7. Mobile Rest
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@Rome Maker Faire – 6. A Statue(?)
I saw her elevated on that concrete block — standing still, upright, focused — and couldn’t not take the photo. For a moment she looked monumental, absurdly dignified, like a civic sculpture in summer sandals. Phone raised in that familiar vertical salute, frozen mid-frame as if cast in bronze. The tension between the everyday and the iconic was too rich to ignore. The humour in this image comes not from mockery but from geometry. The white tent backdrop flattens the space, stripping it of any visual depth and turning her into a cutout against a temporary canvas. Her floral dress softens the hard lines of the block and rigging, while…
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@Rome Maker Faire – 5. Pensive
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@Rome Maker Faire – 4. The Hands Controller
This photograph came from a fleeting moment of curiosity—small hands interacting with a larger idea. On the tablet’s bright display, a robotic hand glows in cool, almost clinical blue, juxtaposed with the warm, human fingers controlling it. The setting was a science exhibition, the kind of place where technology and wonder mingle in the air, and where gestures can bridge the gap between imagination and mechanics. From a compositional standpoint, the frame is tight and deliberate. The cropped view keeps our focus locked on the hands—both human and mechanical—without distraction from the surrounding environment. The diagonal placement of the tablet brings energy to the image, preventing it from feeling static,…
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An Old Portable Camera
I didn’t stage this. The camera was already set up for a workshop in the park, a portable wooden box on a tripod, complete with focusing cloth and a ground glass screen. What drew me wasn’t the device itself—it was the reaction it triggered. The boy shielding his eyes, squinting into the past through a lens designed long before smartphones flattened photography into a gesture. The composition is dense in its centre, almost chaotic with overlapping limbs and sneakers. But the tripod anchors it. The machine, primitive and precise, holds its ground in a circle of discovery. I kept the perspective low and frontal to emphasise its presence as a…
