Renovating Milan

Milan, November 2017. A construction site—not the kind that demands attention, but the quiet kind that hides behind fabric and scaffolding.

I took this photo walking past it for the third or fourth time. What stopped me wasn’t the building itself, but its ghost. Behind the mesh screen, the silhouette of the old façade still lingered, like a memory bleeding through fabric. Chimneys, outlines, the suggestion of windows. The city behind the curtain.

At the bottom, the standard construction notice: printed bureaucracy stapled to metal, a reminder that change is always sanctioned, scheduled, structured. But the rest of the image resists clarity. Straight lines waver, verticals drift. Even the fence feels like it’s trying not to be seen.

Shot in black and white, because the scene offered no colour worth chasing. The mood was already grey—filtered through autumn, dust, and routine. No drama. No contrast spike. Just a moment of stillness in a city that rarely stops dressing itself.

Sometimes a city’s transformation looks less like progress and more like a pause.