Rear window (the_bench)
P- They're all the same.
A- That's right. More than four thousand pictures of the same place.
P- I've never seen anything like it.
A- It's my project. What you'd call my life's work.
P- Amazing. I'm not sure I get it, though. I mean, how did you ever come up with the idea to do this ... this project?
A- I don't know, it just came to me. It's my corner, after all. It's just one little part of the world, but things happen there, too, just like everywhere else. It's a record of my little spot.
P- It's kind of overwhelming.
A- You'll never get it if you don't slow down, my friend.
P- What do you mean?
A- I mean, you're going too fast. You're hardly even looking at the pictures.
P- But they're all the same.
A- They're all the same, but each one is different from every other one.
(Dialogue from the film “Smoke”, by Paul Auster)
“Rear Window” it's an ongoing long-term project, a work on space and time, permanence and impermanence, fiction and reality, on the relationship between photography and people control. Starting from 2019 I shot every day, from the same place with the same frame, but the images of the series could be screenshots taken from the videos of one of the many CCTV cameras present in every corner of our cities.
About the current debate over human surveillance and use of personal data, increasingly present in the media, my work tries to catch the Zeitgeist in a completely individual way.
The park bench has become the ideal set to investigate daily life in a place where the city slows down its run, becomes more tolerant and less formal, a place of interaction, interesting from a sociological and anthropological point of view. Each image of the project is the celebration of an unnoticed moment.
From a formal point of view my work walks on the border between documentary and research photography. I am not interested in investigating a specific and literal truth: my "documentary" plays with truth and abstraction, when I expand some details through the use of digital magnification and pixels. I also use multiple images to highlight the sense of the project, based not on the single images, but precisely on the seriality of the images and the fact that seriality in photography is closely linked to the concept of space and time.
Project has a obsessive/voyeuristic component too, a sort of "Rear Window" on the park (with an evident reference to the film by Hitchcock) and it is on Instagram (__ @ the_bench__), the most voyeuristic social network. The choice of square format focuses on the bench, but also recalls IG layout.
Milano, 2019-ongoing
