Empty Theatres

...Since I discovered imagery, my life has never been the same. The start was very sudden and unexpected, during a foggy November night...

It was such troubled and dull days: all the expectations that a 25 years-old guy cares about seem to go astray from my way, even if I tried to keep my commitment as higher as possible. The more I try to hold on, the more the results sound like a stone thrown into black water. I was loosing confidence and my mood was declining into a worrisome and subtle zone where everything looks indifferent and tasteless.

One night I was leafing through the pages of a black and white photography book in the reassuring light of my place. I remember the heavy textured cotton pages wrapped in a red silk cover with a tiny silver headline in the middle: Japan!
I can’t really write down the powerfulness of those images, but I still clearly remember the impressive sense of suggestion that run down on me, like a stick in my heart. Not a single word was used to convey the message: it feels like standing in the front of an empty and silent theatre figuring out characters playing, moving, shouting or whispering.

Only several months later on, I understood my unconscious feelings about the moment, how subjects and appearance interacted tight together to hit the inner part of my brain where emotions live in. Anyway I was strongly attracted by the powerfulness of a language that was able to go beyond words and rational functions.
That new way of sensing reality seemed to me such a big enhancement. I was looking at what my eyes should have seen but were not able to see, the essence itself of places, moments and memories, the softness of details, the relationship with time passing by.
Something was warning me that photography should represent a new tool to undercover good feelings and uncover special emotions from grey suburbia I used to live in.

From that moment on, anything won’t be the same. A special and inevitable though goes with no reward to Michael Kenna, my deepest inspiration!