It is Irrational

Photography has on me a benefic effect that I have difficulties to fully comprehend myself, leave alone to explain it.

In fact, I don’t really know why I am taking photographs. I only know that when I do it, I feel better.

It is something more than pleasure or joy, it is a sense of deep wellbeing.

In my daily ordinary job, I have to actively think and consciously take decisions rationally, using acquired knowledge and experience otherwise nothing would come spontaneously. When photographing instead, beside some acquired basic knowledge, there is no active thinking or rational analysis on going, it is just happening.

Walking with a camera in the hand, looking around for a composition, taking the picture and later looking at the results, detach me from my thoughts. In those moments my mind is fully absorbed into the image’s creation but in an irrational and pleasant manner, even when the process is not going smooth or the pictures are not as expected.

Photography seems to be a gate to exit from my daily life and to enter inside myself, leaving everything behind.

It is a strange sensation, taking pictures feels like who I am rather than what I do.

Behind the camera there is me, not my mind, there is no past nor future, only the present instant.

In fact, the pictures themselves are not really important because all the steps taken to produce them matter, they are what make me feel myself. The results, my actual images alone are only an aesthetic summary, a representation.

In a way, I see photography as very interior process with the pictures being small glimpses of our cryptic inner own worlds.

It is totally irrational and probably that’s why it feels so good.