These images at first glance would appear to be a series of still lifes, of details and objects, mainly chairs, motionless and almost without human presence.
However, when one encounters an empty chair in the street, an abandoned scooter or a bed without occupants, one can detect both a trace of past presence and an expectation of future occupation.
The point is that we cannot tell from the image whether we are describing a post-apocalyptic scenario in which everyone has just fled some catastrophic Chernobyl-style event, or rather whether these seats, these bar tables, are instead confidently awaiting the arrival of someone who will use them again after having momentarily moved away; or what lies in between these two possibilities.
So this is a modest photographic discourse on the ambiguity of images: as in the metaphor of the glass half-full or half-empty, much depends on the photographer’s hidden state of mind or conscious malice in remaining more or less vague about one or the other interpretation. And much depends on the disposition of spirit of the viewer of these images in leaning towards one or the other perception.
And ambiguity is in itself characteristic and strength of photography: in isolating a moment from a broader context, and in making it eternal like Bob Capa’s militiaman, in declaring itself both a testimony of the real and an abstract symbol, photography oscillates and is never firmly fixed on an unambiguous definition.
It is the captions that sometimes clarify the inherent ambiguities of the photographes, so in this work I preferred to use titles that were as generic as possible, or not at all.
