TERMINI + CASILINO 700 (1997-1999)

At some point I decided, I wanted to try photography but I didn't really know where to start. I was about 20 years old and needed to find my own way, there was no doubt about that. In order to avoid military service and not to be forced into an immediately practical and professional relationship with a new mode of expression, I had enrolled at university, faculty of law. These were studies that I pursued with a certain ease and which - if I had not succeeded with photography - would probably have allowed me to find a normal job, at least that was the advice of my Italian literature professor, who was a person I respected and trusted. Although I felt the need to train myself technically, he always advised me to avoid any kind of academic approach in the creative field - it would not have worked for me. To tell the truth, it was not only him, fate also prevented me from enrolling in a photography school. I tried three times, to no avail. In the breaks from my university studies, which were frequent, I photographed everything, trying to understand where my instinct took me and which aesthetics came closest to my still too nebulous vision of myself and the world. It was a kind of my private own stone age, everything was experimental and unknown. I was attracted by the timeless classical form of photography, but also by a dirty, physical, sensual cinematic approach. So, I used to spend my days at Termini station dressed as a tramp in order to be inconspicuous, with a camera hidden in my coat from which only the end of the lens emerged, crouched at heart height with paper tape and the flexible shutter running down my inner sleeve, and two other smaller cameras in my pocket. I was trying to photograph without being noticed, trying to merge the two opposite photographic approaches that attracted me. I was looking for my distance through contemplation and composition and at the same time a visceral and tactile approach, without even looking. I was trying to figure out where I wanted to be, what I was and at the same time trying to undo myself, whatever I was. The results were mostly poor but I still recognize the emotional tension of my explorations. I wanted to follow every person, I wanted to get on every train. Nobody noticed me until one day I met the gaze of a young gypsy woman who often came to the station to beg. She was beautiful and elegant, had a small daughter accompanying her and an even smaller son who nursed wherever she was. We met irregularly around there, then one day she accepted my request to visit them at the camp where they lived, Casilino 700. From that moment I stopped going to the station and started going to the camp. When I left my scooter on the main road and alone with my camera I walked through the dirt paths to the caravans I was excited and happy, I felt like I had found a simple way to travel far away.

Text by Lorenzo Castore