What would I tell you about me? Well, I would tell you about viewfinders, emotions, waits, magic, hope and study: these are the key words of my life and when I metabolised them and understood them deeply, I had the courage to open my backpack, take out my camera and combine them all in a shot.
This is how I transformed my unbridled love for nature, its colours, sounds and for the endless emotions a landscape can give, into my passion for photography, which I have had for many years now.
Of course I studied … I studied all technical, theoretical and practical notions about the world of photography, but first and foremost, I studied myself, exploring my feelings deep inside, in an intimate loneliness, and I thus learnt to socialise with time, especially with the time of waits: I studied that secret part that a starry night, a flowery meadow, a mountain softly covered with snow were able to arouse inside me, and as soon as I was able to capture that part through the viewfinder, it inspired my breaths and the magic I was looking for in my life, and also inspired those who then admired my shots; it is the emotion of a place that connects who is there physically with who observes it through a picture.
Realizing that I was able to do this, that is, arousing emotions through a shot, was the main input for me to give up everything else and finally join myself and that world I had been watching from the outside throughout my life, silent and composed, and that all of a sudden seemed to have turned into a wave: a world that wanted to communicate in a wordless language and rather used emotional magic as a surfboard on the blue water glittered with the first stars of the night.
And while waiting there, alone, with a gentle wind caressing my face, surrounded by that dark sky, all the rest outside me calmed down. Haunted by unreality and enchanted by beauty, I listened to the world. A world that took me by hand and guided me in my journeys to crystallise a moment of time and turn it into an eternal instant, and to combine a set of feelings that could suddenly be shared with whoever was willing to be inspired by them.
I was there ... on the edge, after long walks and climbs, sometimes even a little risky, waiting for the poetry of a unique moment I had learnt to capture ... I was there ... and hopeful.
Hope always leads farther than fear, and just as hope stably takes root in the rocks, I never gave up and kept on searching, waiting, and shooting: at a time when life often oppresses us, an instant can be enough to save me and make me happy.
And when I learnt to do this through photography, I wanted to start teaching it. And to those who ask me “why should I take a course in photography?”, my answer is that “being able to watch the outside world is not enough, it is also necessary to go beyond our visual experience, and this is what I have learnt to do over all these years, with so much patience and dedication”.
Working as a photographer is an extraordinary journey!