Mattia Balsamini reist für seine Aufträge durch Italien und hat das Jahr der Pandemie für ein Buch genutzt, das demnächst erscheinen wird. Darüber, über die Rolle der Fotografie und darüber, wie er arbeitet, hat er mit den #FacesOfPhotography gesprochen:
Mattia, how are you?
I’m happy to say I’m doing relatively good. Last year I moved from Milan to my hometown near Venice. It is a place very dear to my heart. I did this right before the beginning of this radical crisis and change we are still facing, and I found a more balanced pace between urgency and calmness. I decided a smaller town, for now, suits absolutely the situation. At the moment I travel nationally for work, but I put all the international trips temporarily on hold.
What is the current situation in Italy?
Italy decided to give a »grade”« to all regions – red, orange or yellow. Depending on a set of parameters like hospital performance, quantity of patients and many other factors, a region is allowed to be relatively functional or basic in full lockdown. Traveling is basically allowed only for work or urgent matters. Luckily as a freelance I am often in this situation yet of course I cannot stop thinking about the impact we will be having in the upcoming years.
How do you see the role of photography in these times?
Photography can be a mean of communication as it has always been. It can perform at different levels, from informative, to leisure, from social to eye candy. All of this in the realm of being culturally relevant and educative. For me during last year first lockdown experience it has brought out an introspective side of my interests. I focused on making my interest in forms, colors and atmospheres the subject itself of my photography. This exercise helped making sense of older images in my archive that I kept going back to. Almost a year later a my first book about this process is about to be published. I worked with publishing house Skinnerboox on a »In Search of Appropriate Images” – we are working to make it available around mid March 2021.
What means photography for you personally?
My approach to the photographic medium stems from a contrast between two ways of representing the subjects that attract me. On the one hand, the need to understand what is in front of me, a fascination with the beauty and content usefulness of a didactic representation of things – I believe also dictated by the editorial and commercial context for which I often make commissions. On the other hand, there is the need for abstraction of reality – a sort of inability to accept things as they are, intervening and forcing a gaze that is always painstakingly new for me towards familiar subjects. Sometimes it can happen that these two strands meet fortuitously, producing the images I’m most interested in. Over the past seven years, working on editorial assignments, alongside my personal work, I have decided to partially demystify the situations related to the commercial work I was carrying out, many of which related to experimentation, new technologies, industrial and highly automated processes. I used the photographic medium to break down what I was looking at, working on the aesthetics of functionality, looking for simpler and at the same time magical and mellow concepts, more easily associated with my childhood memories.
What have you personally experienced job-wise in the last weeks and months?
I’ve experienced a rollercoaster of emotion from being still and wanting to be active, then I’ve active while perhaps some of us were forced to be still, then I’ve been pretty work free and worried and then things started to pick up again. Basically it has been the same up and down as usual in this type of career, but with larger excursions. I plan to stay extremely flexible and focused on quality but most importantly on interest.
What is your personal photographic wish for the future?
I want to keep producing work that matters to me – as it is clearly the only ethically sustainable method. And I hope my interest match the needs of commercial and editorial commissioners to keep making this job possibile.
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Natürlich können Sie auch gerne über Fotogloria Kontakt zu Mattia aufnehmen – melden Sie sich jederzeit unter 040 609 42 906 -0 oder info@fotogloria.de