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Italian Stardust
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Behind the Glass
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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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Too Big To Be Dumped
This frame came to life walking past an alley where time seems to have hit pause. The bins stand in perfect alignment, regimented like bureaucratic soldiers, while behind them, the decaying wall tells a different story—chaotic, layered, unresolved. I shot this with a 35mm prime, letting the midday sun carve stark shadows that add to the irony of this supposed order. The exposure demanded precision. Too much light and I’d have lost the texture on the old plaster; too little and the bins would sink into murk. I leaned into the contrast, embracing the Leica’s natural tonal harshness in black and white. No dramatic angles, no “decisive moment” flourish—just frontal,…
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A Haunted(?) House
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Urban Desolation
This photograph is part of a study I’ve been developing on marginal architecture—spaces neglected by urban development yet still clinging to presence. The building isn’t ruined in a picturesque way. It’s just exhausted. Scarred concrete, flaking plaster, and rusted grates stand as accidental testimonies of permanence beyond usefulness. I composed the frame to draw the viewer’s eye along the length of the structure, ending with the blurred outlines of new buildings in the background. The juxtaposition isn’t subtle—it wasn’t meant to be. These walls hold layers of past usage, from the makeshift repairs to the graffiti tags now fading like old memories. Technically, the photo rides a fine line between…
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God Save the Queen!
The Union Jack, proudly emblazoned—not on a mast or parade, but wrapped around the rear-view mirror of a Mini Cooper. Once a symbol of British ingenuity and resilience, the Mini now serves as a rolling contradiction: a British icon, manufactured under the ownership of German automaker BMW. This photograph, titled with deliberate irony, compresses decades of cultural transformation into a single detail. “God Save the Queen” here becomes less anthem than marketing slogan. The monarch’s presence lingers not in statecraft or ceremony, but as a lacquered pattern on consumer machinery. The mirror itself is a fitting metaphor. It reflects, but only partially. What was once national pride has become exportable…
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A Broken Gearwheel
I came across this fragment of concrete by chance — two heavy, jagged halves lying on a bed of smooth stones, their shapes echoing the teeth of a gearwheel. It looked industrial, almost mechanical, yet entirely static and inert. There was no motion here, only the suggestion of it, frozen in decay. When I composed the frame, I aimed to make the gear the clear focal point while still allowing the surrounding textures to play their part. The roughness of the stone bed contrasts nicely with the flat, worn surface of the concrete pieces. The diagonal orientation of the gear halves gives the image a touch of dynamism that the…
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A Green Patch
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When We Thought We Would Have Changed The World
I took this photograph at a street market, where these shirts hung in plain view, each one shouting a message of defiance. Slogans, graphics, and colours combined into a tapestry of protest, reminders of a time when politics and identity were worn quite literally on the chest. The immediacy of the words—ribelli sempre, non mi avrete mai come volete voi—speaks of resistance, of collective identity built in opposition to authority. I framed the image tightly to remove context and distractions. The viewer is left with nothing but the shirts, their messages, and the pins holding them up. This close composition turns an everyday street scene into a typographic study. The…
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Santino’s Photo& Video at Broadway
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An Attentive Listener
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Just Another Times Square View
I made this photograph in 2000, standing in Times Square with a Canon film camera loaded with Portra 160. It was a different city then—louder in some ways, rougher at the edges, less polished than the LED-saturated spectacle it would later become. What interested me was not the chaos itself, but the uneasy coexistence between permanence and transience: stone and steel on one side, light and commerce on the other. The composition is deliberately vertical, almost architectural. The frame stacks elements upward rather than outward: the dense mass of midtown buildings rises on the left, while the illuminated billboards dominate the right. The Budweiser sign acts as a visual anchor,…
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Mulberry Street, When Benito II Was Still There…
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Arriba El Mexico!
I took this photograph from the passenger seat of a cab, during that suspended moment when traffic stalls and the city becomes a collage of reflections and colour. The small felt figure hanging from the mirror caught my attention first—bright, slightly absurd, and placed without irony. The tiny sombrero, the stitched flag, the green felt body: a souvenir turned mascot, living in the blurred space between décor and identity. What interested me was how this small object commanded the frame. The background—city lights, signage, fragments of buildings—exists only as colour fields and soft shapes. The mirror picks up hints of the driver, the interior, and the street behind us, but…
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The Spanish Sense of Flesh – 2
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The Spanish Sense of Flesh – 1
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The Unconvinced Listener
This was one of those shots where the scene composed itself. I didn’t need to move much—just recognise and release the shutter. What drew me in was the geometry of the interaction: a makeshift stage, oversaturated lighting washing the performers in synthetic blue, and in the foreground, a single man caught mid-gesture, possibly clapping, possibly holding a phone, or perhaps neither—his posture uncertain and unaligned with the music unfolding metres ahead. The band, framed neatly under the overhang of a modern tram stop, seems to exist in its own world, driven by rhythm, sequins, and stage light bravado. They’re working hard. But the man in the foreground? He’s not buying…
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Waiting For The Elections
Shot on a Leica M9 with a Zeiss Biogon 35mm f/2.8, this image is more about suspension than action. The frame holds a waiting posture — literally and metaphorically. No speeches, no slogans, just the inertia of democratic process taking over the political machinery. I wanted to convey stillness without silence. The Biogon’s rendering gave me that microcontrast and edge clarity I rely on when details matter more than gestures. The M9 sensor — as unpredictable as it can be in mixed light — held together the tonal values well here, especially in the midtones. Shadow detail was secondary; this wasn’t about hiding or revealing, but about the unresolved pause…
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Though Choice
It doesn’t take much to make your day happy.
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No, You Don’t Need To Change Your Glasses
This was intentional. No missed autofocus, no technical glitch. I set the lens manually, focused nowhere, and waited for someone to walk into the blur. He did—carrying two bright yellow bags, dressed sharply but casually, perfectly unremarkable in the sharp world we expect from street photography. The concept was simple: remove clarity and see what remains. What I found was structure. Colour. Gait. Gesture. A kind of abstraction that doesn’t erase the human, just detaches it from identification. No face. No detail. But still a presence. Technically, the image defies critique by design. It isn’t sharp—at all. The highlights push into soft bloom, the street dissolves into haze, and the…
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The Lost Lock
The photograph is focused on the weathered surface of a wooden door, its grain worn deep by time and use. At the centre sits a latch, secured by a small brass pin, surrounded by the scars of previous fittings. Above it, oversized keyholes mark the door’s history of repairs and replacements, each shadow stretching long across the wood in the midday light. Technically, the image is about texture and shadow. The exposure favours the roughness of the timber, rendering every fissure and nail hole in sharp detail. The sunlight is strong, but instead of washing out the surface, it enhances contrast, pulling the metallic coldness of the lock against the…
