My fascination with images began when I was a child. I still remember the worlds I imagined and how eagerly I waited to see my first photographs. When that first roll came back, the disappointment was enormous: it looked nothing like what I had seen through the viewfinder. Perhaps everything that came afterwards — editing, colour, compositing — has been a long way of closing that gap.
After years of working with the moving image, still photography feels like a necessary pause, a way of paying attention to the moment again. Freezing a moment is almost a way of giving permanence to a memory that would otherwise be lost in the continuous flow. And it takes me back to that child waiting for the prints.
Venezuela
Venezuela is that warm grandmother whose table always has room for one more. My grandparents arrived there from South Tyrol after the war and found a country that opened its arms to them, in years of prosperity that many have now forgotten.
Venezuela is drums, sugar cane juice, endless beaches and Angel Falls, which astonishes the whole world with a drop of almost a kilometre. Its landscapes are as abundant as its resources, and its resources as abundant as its misfortunes are today. I left almost twenty years ago and not a day goes by without my missing its generosity and its joy. Its people, however, are still smiling, convinced that the price of living in paradise is having to deal, every now and then, with the snakes.
Mexico
No country has taught me the meaning of the word stridency the way Mexico has. The colours, the flavours, the people, every corner of its cities and its towns: everything shouts at once, and yet nothing is out of tune.
Street and Art
The street is where the intentional and the accidental live together: someone painted that wall, nobody placed that light. Graffiti, shop windows, façades and city lights are sources of inspiration that turn up without being asked for.
Caribbean
There is a feeling that everyone born in this part of the world recognises: salt on the lips, sea air working its way into the lungs. You do not need to see the water to know that it is close. Photographing it means trying to make what cannot be seen show.
Dalí in Tampa
Before I start creating I always go back to the still image, and above all to painting, which never exhausts its narrative potential. I did not expect to find the largest Dalí museum outside Europe in St. Petersburg, Florida. I came away with more ideas than photographs.
Portrait
The portrait is the kind of photography that makes me most aware that I am keeping memory. Only through portraits can you travel in time and learn something about those who are no longer here.