Andrea Simonato
@3 years ago with 5 notes
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself. I’m 38 and I live in Este, a little town in the north of Italy. I have studied as architect but I’m working as web-designer. What excites me at moment? These days I’m in love with the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson, I find it really inspiring.
There are never any people in your photographs, why is this?
That’s true, indeed I don’t know if there is a good reason for that, no kind of premeditation I mean. Maybe this is due to the fact that at the moment I’m more interested in the traces of human passage rather than the human being itself. Anyway, even if there are no people in my photos, somehow every subject talks about them.The objects you photograph are often very ephemeral: peeling posters, dead animals, and abandoned buildings. Do you see you work, in part, as a kind of document, or evidence for things that will not exist for very long?
Yes, they may be read as a kind of evidence. In general I’m fascinated by the frailty of the kind of stuff which stands on the edge of disappearing, this can be the peeled posters or the garbage on the side of the street. Things that have lost their original function and therefore seems to have lost all meaning too. If we could take a step beyond, we may consider any ordinary thing as something on the edge of disappearing just because of its familiarity to our eyes. In that sense I would like to think that photography could work as a kind of redemption for all those things, a way to put a new significance into them.
How important is the idea of landscape to your work?
It’s really important to me, but my idea of landscape is not based on the large views as it commonly used to be, instead I like to think of landscape as a construction of a series of images. Like a puzzle, where each piece contributes in the definition of a bigger image.
You have a very strong compositional style. Can you talk a
little about the significance of it to your work?
I don’t know if this could be about compositional style but I always loved the kind of image that seem to express a sensation of calm, they’re often so static almost suspended out of time. So when shooting a photo, what I’m always trying to achieve is that kind of feeling. I would like to get an image that speaks through calm and silence.
Could you talk a little about your artistic practice? How do you go about creating your images? What role does chance and circumstance play and how important are technical decisions, like camera choice, to your work?
There isn’t any straight workflow indeed. You know, sometimes I work on ideas, other times it may happen that I started from a clue suggested by a previous photo, or something else I’ve seen, but quite often I prefer to follow the feeling of the moment, I guess that it’s a common practise. Of course, technical decisions matter a lot, it’s about the mood you’re meant to get from the shot. Using a Holga rather than a digital camera makes a difference, it’s the same with the kind of film you use.
I really love your approach to landscape as the creation of images that fit together to form something more. How do you see the relationship between your photographs and do you consciously create that dialogue?
Except for the ‘Stop’ series there isn’t any planning idea behind those relationships. Each photo is firstly thought by itself, it’s only in a following step that I can go find some relation between each one. Somehow, I think it’s a further kind of composition, something like film editing I guess.
And finally, are you working on anything in particular at
the moment? What is inspiring you right now?
Of course I’m still working on the same old stuff, but I’ve also got something new, it isn’t really well focused yet, so I prefer not to talk about it now.
What is inspiring me at this moment? I can’t really exactly say, there are a lot of things… but for sure I would like to be inspired by every little everyday thing, I think it would be a great goal.
