Sometimes I see myself as a huntress in a woods or at the edge of a lake, waiting in ambush to seize her prey. Perhaps this metaphor derives from my studies of mythology.
My eye has been refined through many years of looking at artworks. The contemplation and study of paintings and other kinds of visual art have taught my eyes to recognize, select, and classify formal elements. Form and rhythm have been equally involved in my long-term dedication to music and poetry.
In the end, it is nature that plays an essential role in my life. I cannot stay away from it for long without suffering spiritually and physically.
Well along in my career, and to my own surprise, photography has become the chosen way in which I respond to the innumerable signals nature sends out, indeed the pathway by means of which I enter into the dialogue between natural and artistic forms that has existed for centuries. In nature I rediscover the roots of art, letting them flourish in ever new elaborations. This privileged relationship, fascinating and inexhaustible, moves from knowledge to recognition and beyond.
Many persons ask me what techniques I use. My photographic skill consists mainly of patient observation. The camera allows me to capture and to share with others the consonant harmonies that are unveiled when I go deep into natural environments, armed with a concentrated vigilance of senses and will. Is there such a thing as dissonance in nature? Nature knows where it’s going, that’s clear, but as it proceeds it manifests itself in a series of perpetually changing configurations that speak out and communicate. What they tell us is their own process of becoming. In myself I perceive that same process of coming into being in an open-ended, sempiternal flow. How could I fail to identify with what I see? Indeed, I have the feeling I exist only in those moments in which I find in nature reflections of my essential self. This perception would be Romantic were it not tempered by an intense and quite contemporary awareness of nature’s fragility and of our own perverse and often destructive relationship with it.
In any case, my photographs do not teach or warn; they attempt to render that which nature could be if left to itself, in repose—this last state remaining always an illusion, given that, below the surface, it ferments, moves imperceptibly, and will vanquish us if we are hostile.
Pondering my metaphor, it strikes me that my staying still as I gaze is not predatory. Rather than seizing upon and ravishing what is out there, I offer myself as a medium through which nature reveals itself as harmony, eloquence, and the continuous reintegration of a fragmentation simultaneously taking place, one that art is capable of absorbing from its peculiarly artificial yet intimate distance.
Finally, photography has been and continues to be for me a splendid and fresh adventure that is, at the same time, a kind of spiritual exercise. This work of inner concentration takes me beyond where I am to a place where, ideally, I transport others and myself. Once more I feel surprise, for in the end this place feels entirely familiar.