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AI or not AI?
The original title of this photograph was ‘When the wait to see the doctor is too long’, and it was intended to illustrate how the ‘framing’ of an image into a particular concept changes – or creates from scratch – its overall meaning.However, when a friend of mine saw it, he commented, ‘Is this made by AI?’ Making a pun with my initials, I replied ‘No, it is not AI, it is AM’.Joking aside, what made me think is that this image could not have been further from being AI-generated: it was shot on film, with a twenty-year-old point-and-shoot camera loaded with a fifteen-year-old Ilford HP5 400 roll, yet it…
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Light as Meaning Shifter
The original idea behind this picture was to match the emptiness of the shop with the facelessness of the mannequin posing as a store clerk, to convey a general feeling of depersonalization. Unfortunately, the big lightblot represented by the poster close to the mannequin catches the observer’s attention and reduce the effectiveness of the composition. Instead of connecting the mannequin with the internal part of the store thus making sense of the whole picture, the eye just “sees” an ad poster.
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Keep Out!
This photo conveys a message of “rejection”: first, a security guard who blocks access to the jewellery and then a signal of a prohibition of access reinforces the concept, thanks to a composition that guides the eye to a diagonal that goes from the bottom to the top, from left to right. Obviously, there is nothing “true” about all this because the overall result is the result of the organization of the spaces and the management of the perspective that allow connecting semantically elements that, in reality, have no relationship between them. It would have been enough to shoot from a different angle – or not juxtapose the security guard…
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Not A Rorschach Inkblot
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A Dragon Trainer?
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Red Wine Makes Good Blood…
I made this image at the end of a long lunch — the kind where conversation lingers long after the plates are cleared, and the table becomes less of a place to eat and more a canvas of what just happened. The residue of red wine had bled into the paper surface, leaving behind those familiar circular stains — not accidental, not staged, just there. And I leaned in, glass still in hand, and shot. Technically, this is an exercise in distortion and proximity. I used a wide lens, close focus, and a shallow depth of field. The resulting visual field is warped, but purposefully. You can see the sweep…
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The Eye
Another example of the constant brain’s meaning quest in the things the eye sees. It wasn’t supposed to look back. This is the underside of a building’s curved overhang, a detail most people would never glance up to see. Shot from the ground in perfect alignment, it becomes something else entirely: an iris of steel and shadow, a lens with no glass, watching the world below. I titled it The Eye not just for the shape, but for the feeling. The symmetry is strict—deliberate, almost mechanical—yet the reflection in the polished granite softens it, turning precision into something poetic. A full circle emerges where there’s only a half. What’s solid becomes imagined.…
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On the Edge of the World
This image is the outcome of a technical test as much as it is a commentary on environment and perception. I wanted to see how the venerable 1973 Nikkor 16mm f/3.5 fisheye would behave on the full-frame sensor of a Nikon D700. The result is a picture pulled to its edges, both optically and metaphorically. What this lens gives in distortion, it returns in expressive tension. The beach curves like the edge of a planet. The sky presses down as if it’s wrapping itself around the scene. A single line of debris cuts through the frame, pulling the eye toward a loosely gathered group of people, whose presence feels both…
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Bent
When I first lifted the camera to my eye for this shot, the Nikkor 16mm fisheye was not the lens you’d expect for such a pastoral, rolling landscape. Fisheyes, after all, are often the tools of cramped interiors, extreme sports, or deliberately surreal perspectives. Yet here, in the middle of vineyard country, I wanted to see what would happen if I let its inherent distortion play with the natural undulations of the hills. The result is a scene that feels almost elastic. The road on the right curves away more dramatically than it does in reality, while the vineyard rows tilt into an exaggerated arc, their geometry bending to the…
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Brain vs Camera
The picture on the left is what the camera saw. The picture on the right is what I had in mind while shooting. Thanks to Photoshop I’ve been able to bend the “objectivity” of the camera along the line of my creativity.
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Lamp
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Ni
I photographed this wall for its simplicity: two scraps of weathered wood fixed to rough concrete, nothing more. Yet in their placement they formed a minimal composition, two marks on a textured surface that immediately reminded me of the Japanese character for “two” (二). It was not intended, but the resonance was unavoidable once I saw it through the viewfinder. The surface itself does much of the work. The granular, uneven wall contrasts sharply with the grain of the old planks. The top piece, broader and darker, bears the scars of age—splits, nails, faint stains. The lower fragment, smaller and lighter, almost echoes it, as if the two are in…
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Multiple Meaning
We do see, in a picture, what we want to see. While the vast majority would focus on the dynamics between the shooter with the hoodie and the man with spectacles, those familiar with the inner circle of photography in Pescara will immediately spot, behind the man, Mrs. Franca Cauti, the Big Boss at Ohmasa Foto Video…
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When The Passion Is Gone (thank to a sneaky photographer)
The close-up delivers a feeling of hot passion, as often tangueros do. But a wider view, including that sneaky photographer, kills the mood.
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