“There is an intelligible geometry, a thread of story telling and sense making that exist but cannot be use for precise accounting now. We know it’s there, but we still don’t know where is leading”.
The story behind the printing of ESTATE
As every summer when August is approaching, I was exhausted. After a year long shooting for clients, magazines and dealing with life, it was the time to take a break. Go to holiday. Never more needed as last year. I was really tired, the year was long and intense, I was fed up with the city and the fashion agenda with its menswear, womenswear and couture.
It was time to take a break. I had no plan last summer, I just had an invitation from a friend who bought a little fisherman’s house in the south of Italy and proposed me to come over for a week or two as he had just made renovations and wanted to inaugurate the house.
In the meanwhile I was not completely lonely in my life at that period. During last spring I had met this really pretty girl in Paris. We were seeing each other in a really casual way. No feelings involved, at least I guess from my side at the time, just fun and mutual care.
We managed to fall in love with each other on a foray in a castle of a friend in the weekend of 14th of July, the French National Holiday and celebration of the taken of the Bastille. The day when the whole modern world celebrate the revolution of the people against the supremacy of Monarchy and cracks fireworks in the air, yes this very special day of the year was meant to celebrate my own revolution, too.
The day after the celebration we both realised that we could not spend any more our lives separate, but we realised that just a week after we were both leaving town for our own summer break. Crap! We wanted more time together.
She had planned to spend some of her August holidays in Amsterdam and Moscow, I was going to Puglia. I pitched the world map in my head and I said to her “Ok, let’s have a week together this summer. Let’s meet half way, in a place with sun and sea. A special place we both haven’t visited yet.”
We both left each other the last days of July with the promise to have a date, in the airport of Dubrovnik, the 6th of August.
I invited my friend to join us, I was wondering if he liked the idea to travel as a trio. Her and him met just once before this holiday at a fashion party, just few weeks before our departure to Puglia. Just one single night, we were the three of us tipsy and we didn’t care of anything that having fun that night. But somehow the connection was made.
What happened on these days is now here, printed on paper, spread on social media, released as a publication in a Museum in Florence, too.
All this publicity was the only thing that was not planned. Me and my friend always carry our film cameras with us when we travel. Heavy bags, old camera body, exposed film rolls through airport security, the incertitude of the result. We carry these cameras and films as mothers with their babies. We not even really know why we do that, all this efforts on top of the every day hard work. I think we do it because there must be a superior reason to all that. There is an intelligible geometry, a thread of story telling and sense making that exist but cannot be use for precise accounting now. We know it’s there, but we we still don’t know where is leading.
PS. When we were shooting the divers in Sarajevo, the only photo reporter present at the venue asked us: “Guys, why you still shoot in film rather then digital?” We answered - Because it’s beautiful - and he said - Yes, but why?” He did not get our answer, and we are still looking for the answer, too.
Thanks to Nik Gallo and Armando Bruto of Bruto Fanzine to publish these pictures giving us advices but leaving us complete freedom. And thanks to us, to make all this magic happen.
Paris, March 2018
