Location: Italy – Roma, Napoli
Once upon a time there was winter with its load of frost, short, grey, cold and damp days.
Now winter is almost over, both in the proper sense of the season (as I write this we are already past mid-March), and in a more general sense: this winter of 2024, like many of its predecessors, was more a prolongation of autumn into the incipient spring, in defiance of all sceptics and climate change deniers.
To recall the existence of an almost forgotten season, I have collected some photographs of skies and clouds over the city taken at various times over the last few months: a remembrance of times past and at the same time an announcement of those to come.
Stieglitz wrote roughly one hundred years ago: “I wanted to photograph clouds in order to discover what I had learned in forty years of photography (…) to show that my photographs were not due to content or subjects (…) nor to particular gifts: the clouds are there for everyone, they are free.”
And so, with due homage to the Maestro, I too made use of them by making them the protagonists, together with the city profile, of this work devoid of any other subjects and content other than the atmosphere between resignation and alarm that one breathes at this end of the season.
Postcards from an aborted winter, in which the very compact clouds that should represent it instead fray and reflect an ambiguous and alienating light on the suspended city, a sign of an already ungrateful present and a very unpromising future.
Clouds upon us observe the world and tray to suggest what’s wrong but… do we look at them as Pietro Coppa does or do we just take them for grant?