Photography contains the magic of representing in the most realistic way that something totally unreal is known.

The instant.

 the soul 

Shooting is no longer the work of someone who extracts a fragment from time, but represents only the epilogue, the synthesis; the way to steal in the lives of others the strength and soul that do not belong to us.

Bold, provocative, lucid or irreverent. The dream that vibrates in that fraction of thought is only the conscious coincidence that can happen, the magical encounter between light and its refraction become the tangible obsession in an unconditional reflex. The image tells the certainty of a happiness that had but not possessed, the indelible proof, the irreverent awareness of every result, error or luck.

The strength of the word or the power of the image, which communication respects the perception of an idea? ... Perhaps we need to let ourselves be carried away by this sensitive doubt and believe at least once that it is possible to dwell on one's own emotion as a reaction to the thoughts of others. The image deteriorated by its perceptive meaning evokes the encounter with a different but no less eloquent reality, the reflection that up until that moment belonged to a context is torn away, and then, immediately afterwards, it carves a celluloid line and recovers a soul that will belong to him forever.

 the references 

I found again in the images that I shot almost automatically, those kind ways already seen in the works of Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis, I was morbidly attracted by seizing, stealing, almost tearing away, fragments of life of my subjects. It was a bit like entering a physical, intimate contact with the subject I could steal the soul and the strength that didn't belong to me.

So every moment became a relationship, a story, that instant magically carved on celluloid by light, it no longer remained a two-dimensional trait but was part of me, forever.

From authors like Sebastiao Salgado or Gianni Bordengo Gardin I learned the documentary and evocative value of photographic expression, others like Donal Moloney or Helmut Newton's have transmitted me the form and technique of this communication. Their influences were determined to get closer to what resided within me; but it is from cinema that the stimulus to artistic maturity and definitive awareness has arrived.

"Der Himmel über Berlin" from Wim Wenders' 87 was a shocking experience for me, "The Double Vie de Véronique" by Krzysztof Kieślowski's 91, and then the discovery of authors such as Pedro Almodóvar and François Ozon. Understand from their work that my photography could be really narrative, the shot was only the epilogue, the synthesis, the provocation to extract a story, a lived experience, a way to extend time and make us immortal.

Finally the encounter with what for me is the sublime work of Anders Petersen and Jürgen Baldiga, the true genius, the accompaniment towards a new point of view; the new visual experience, what manages to move the mind, to open it towards a new possible interpretation. The archetype that manages to make the new "vision" perceptible and tangible, the modulation of an unknown, attractive and inevitable thought, a transport between dreamlike sensations and oblivion.

©  Luca Grasselli - All Right Reserved