’ve never been particularly interested in taking pictures since I made a long road trip to Africa. I was 24. So I asked a friend to borrow me a camera with a single 50mm lens. I wanted to know at least few technical tricks and I was simply told to shoot whenever I could see 1/60s inside the viewfinder, no less than that.
Of course the pictures were pretty awful, but I did enjoy very much to shoot, and once I was back home wait and see the results. Since then I decided that photographer could have been a quite funny and interesting job. I was 25. Then a photo school in Milan, and then the luck to meet Ferdinando Scianna and being his assistant and browse his massive 40years career archive.
I realized how photographing is a way of seeing things that other people simply doesn’t notice, with a constant need to frame everything and put it in a sort of visual order. But most of all is a way, especially doing portrait, to meet and talk with people with all kind of backgrounds, and the challenge is always to find a key to enter in their world, no matter where they come from, and hopefully learn something new.
