Time and Illusion
The illusion of playing with Time, to stop it, and the illusion of playing with reality enlivens this project. Time is of old film photographs and time of current digital photographs, Illusion is of making these images contemporary.
These images originate from my mother’s old photos. Her photographs are taken in the decade 1970/1980 and show my mother as a young girl. Firstly, I thought about this project when I was twenty-four years old. In fact, in that period I started to collect old photos of my mother and some clothes of her youth. Selfportraits started on 2021. The final composition is the union with my mother’s old photos and my selfportraits.
I chose images where we look most alike, exploiting, therefore, the similar expressions we have in common in these pictures. I tried to identify myself with her, even wearing her own very clothes , in the truest sense of the word. I went to the same places where my mother posed for the original pictures. I photographed myself in the same her very pose, at the same moment of the day and possibly in the month which I found written behind the original print. It was interesting discovering changes in those very places, such as trees grown larger, disappeared lakes, sidewalks instead of grasses, and so on. Afterwards I did a work of image manipulation, putting the shots sequentially on negatives. In the end I printed the contact sheets and photographs in my darkroom. My purpose is to give the illusion of contemporaneity in those photographs.
Identity and Authenticity
I composed the series on black and white contact sheets, where the original photograph follows or anticipates its contemporary “reproduction”. Showing images on negatives increases ambiguity.
Indeed, it reinforces the idea of continuity in time of shots. At the same time it calls into doubt the truthfulness and authenticity that generally we attribute to photography.
Furthemore, this work is a reflection on identity, on identification and separation from maternal, and on the long path of its formation.
