admin

The Coffee Project

University assignment. The first two images had to be ad-oriented whereas the second set of images had to be magazine-oriented.

For this project, I was mainly interested in exploring the concept of the word “landscape” used as a verb (“to landscape”). I think that golf courses constitute an interesting example of how humans shape the natural environment, somehow managing to make it still look quite “natural”, just a little bit tidier.

While mostly looking like conventional landscapes, the pictures present elements that don’t feel quite natural in each of them, such as the linearity of the shapes and the colours of the sky and grass.

Wired City

Toronto presents an intricate network of power lines: an element overseen by most locals but that is actually striking for a European coming to Canada. In Europe it is common to bury such cables underground, so the sight of dangling cables everywhere is foreign and quite perplexing. At first, it was hard to imagine the reason why such practice had not spread to the other side of the ocean. However, I later discovered that since the ground freezes for several months a year, it would make maintenance access close to impossible.

Upon learning this, I saw the power system with a different eye. Sure, it was annoying having all those cables in my pictures, but at least I knew it made sense for them to be there. That’s when I realised that they offer a really interesting framing tool so, rather than trying to avoid them, I could make them the main subject and add a strong geometrical factor to the composition of my images.

Throughout this series, wires are juxtaposed with different backgrounds sampled from all over the city. Showcasing a wide variety of colours, textures and perspectives, the images are very abstract and create a certain degree of disorientation, causing the viewer to wonder about the location of a specific shot. The wiring, however, links all the pictures together, just as it links the incredibly complex power grid of Toronto.

Adulthood: A Beginner’s Guide

Adulthood is a frontier most teenagers look forward to crossing. The moment one leaves the comforting nest of the family home is definitely an exciting one, but what comes after that is not always a bed of roses.

In this series of images, I explored the aspects of living alone I have had to face in my everyday life since I moved from Italy to Scotland. The instances I picked resonate with me on a personal level, but I can imagine that a lot of young adults can relate to some of them too: budgeting hardships, diets based on cheap noodles, nerve-racking job interviews and laundry and dish washing duties are at the heart of the daily lives of a lot of people I know. Also, throughout the past few years, I have definitely boarded more planes than entered cars as, especially at the beginning, homesickness is very hard to avoid – does not matter how tough we want to appear.

I represented all of these situations from an ironic point of view; sure, they may be marked as “problems” or “obstacles” by some, but they are indeed laughable annoyances considering how rewarding finally being independent is.

Lost Gaze

Set of two images for my Advanced Lighting Techniques module at Ryerson University. I wanted to play with negative space and I wanted the model to have a lost look on her face in contrast to a lot of commercial and editorial images that we see around us. My main inspiration for this was Valerie Bélin’s series “Mannequins”.