“This is a space in which Italian photographers, men and women of different ages, speak. It is a look at the time in which we are living through photography as a document or as art. But the accent is not on the generations or on influences of various kinds that have been worked out a posteriori. Martina Corà, Guido Guidi, Stefano Graziani, Allegra Martin, Marco Menghi, Michele Nastasi, Filippo Romano, Giovanna Silva, Delfino Sisto Legnani, Alessandra Spranzi and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia have agreed to talk about themselves and their work. 

Out of their words come two kinds of account, a more cogent one on style and technique and another on everyday life: what do you read, tell me something about your typical day? Are there connections between a person’s life and what he or she produces by way of art? Yes, because the places where one has lived, the journeys one has made and one’s various loves in a literal and metaphorical sense all have their weight. 

No, insofar as at a certain point the question pops up of who is doing the talking in photography, whether it is the photographer who controls the operation of his or her alter ego, which is totally unpredictable and constantly changing. In other words, photographers are in a basic condition; they are as alone as any author or artist is, more or less happily, and have the world and its delightful fragments in front of them. They have migrated from film to digital without too much trauma and a sense that every age is by definition, like all the others, one of transition. 

So the questions serve only to get the dialogue going. What emerges through the words, through the more or less avowed moments of abandon or truth, are the personalities in their presence in the world today. The photographer enters and sits down; he or she has read the questions and is ready to respond. Some of them change their clothes before they start; others have prepared sheets of paper with the answers written on them that they are not even going to look at. 

The interview lasts two hours or slightly more and generates fourteen pages of text that is archived for future uses: a book, a study, a joint publication. Other speakers will follow, and not just photographers.

I would like to thank Cristian Del Giudice, Sara Lunghi, Gaetano Corica and Johanna Worton for their help in this project.”