My relationship with photography has changed over time.
In 2017, I decided to turn what had until then been mainly a passion into something more. I entered the world of microstock photography and gradually learned its rhythms, systems and demands. Over the years, the results grew and photography became a consistent professional activity.
And, inevitably, it also became a job.
As photography became more efficient and productive, I began to miss something that had been there before the market: the simple experience of looking at a photograph and wanting to stay with it.
Some of the photographs I have always loved most have that effect on me. They make me stop. I can spend minutes exploring them with my eyes, with no particular need to move on to the next image.
Eventually, that experience led me back to my own archive.
Looking through photographs made over many years became an unexpected journey into my past as a photographer. In some images I could still recognise the same mixture of emotions and states of mind that had made me raise the camera, compose the frame and press the shutter — sometimes many years earlier.
I also began to notice something else.
Most of the time, when I work commercially, photography naturally pushes me towards rhythm, efficiency and production. But occasionally something different happens.
I slow down.
Before I know exactly what I am going to photograph, something catches my attention. My state of mind changes. I become calmer and, at the same time, more alert.
I know there is something there that I don't want to lose.
Those photographs were made in different places, at different times and without a common project in mind. Yet, looking back, certain things kept returning: thresholds, passages, moments of suspension, human presence, relationships, light.
What I was looking for, perhaps, had already been there.
I simply had to learn to recognise it.
Today, my personal work begins from those moments — the ones that make me slow down before I photograph them.
And from a question I am still trying to answer:
Can an image that made me stop make someone else stop too?