Il cimento della fotografia
Photography by Andrea Taurisano
Boundary line
Posted on March 27, 2014
There is a boundary line between what a photographer feels should be documented and shown and what should remain private.
The few photos below are from a project I just did about that boundary line, which in this case happened to coincide with the boundary between life and death.
And these are the only few photos from that project that will ever be displayed on this blog. The other photos need to mature. They may never see the light or may one day be shown in a more appropriate way than on a blog.
If you want to share a thought on where your boundary line goes, as a photographer, or about these shots I shared, please feel free to comment.
Forest of thoughts (pinhole)
Posted on March 5, 2014
Unclear tangle of plants, and thoughts. Kodak Tri-X and modified Sharan pinhole camera, as usual.
By the fjord (pinhole)
Posted on March 3, 2014
February 2014, Trondheim’s fjord, central Norway (probably the first snow free winter in Norwegian history). Kodak Tri-X in modified Sharan pinhole camera.
Trans-Siberian IV: Encounters
Posted on December 6, 2013
Fellow passengers, strangers met in the street, encounters that lasted minutes, hours, few days at the most. Regardless, encounters that made my day and my journey. Here are some of them.
Trans-Siberian III: Train of thoughts
Posted on December 5, 2013
Since I was a child, I’ve always had a tremendous fascination for trains and stations.
We used to travel between the south and the north of Italy a couple of times a year, usually on a night train that would take almost 12 hours. Each and every evening during the weeks prior to our travels, my brother and I spent hours fantasizing about the coming adventure. We could recall details of each station from our previous travels. The lights, the signs, the technical stuff along the tracks, everything had a mysterious charm. When the night of our train adventure came, we couldn’t sleep a minute. Instead, we stood in the aisle and admired the night passing by and becoming a new day. Even the thought of the typical smell of the stations still gives me the goosebumps.
I guess that has something to do with my love for trains. No train journey is too long. And the Trans-Siberian is surely worth repeating.
Trans-Siberian II: Slow motion
Posted on December 4, 2013
9289 km on a train are and definitely feel like a huge distance. Landscapes pass by like in slow motion. Repetitive and monotonous yet ever changing. Days become nights, and the nights days.
Trans-Siberian I: pinhole
Posted on December 4, 2013
First post of a coming series from my Trans-Siberian journey. This with a few pinhole shots.
Why I do this? It’s the closest I get to producing suggestive images from nothing. If I could draw, I’d use charcoal. But I can’t, so I use Tri-X.
See you
Posted on November 6, 2013
The geese and I share an inextinguishable, almost compulsory need to cover great distances, never settling down completely, commuting between opposite corners of the world.
These days they’re flying southwards. In 36 hours, I’ll be heading eastwards, leaving for THE train journey. See you.
Fog (pinhole)
Posted on September 17, 2013
Norway, September 2013. Sharan pinhole camera & Kodak Tri-X.
“Image saving error”
Posted on September 9, 2013
No pixels, no SD cards, no batteries, no auto-focus lenses, no manual focus lenses. No lenses and no focusing at all.
The camera: a cardboard box. The “lens”: a 0.16mm pinhole on the front of the box. The shutter: a removable piece of cardboard covering the pinhole. And off you go: pinhole photography, where each exposure needs seconds in bright light, minutes in low light. A pain in the ass, you may say.
The truth is there is little as rewarding as creating a photo literally from scratch, from building your camera, to judging your exposure times, to developing your film.
In pinhole photography, it’s just the technique’s weaknesses and even your mistakes that result in rewarding and fascinating images. This is a double exposure I got at the end of the last roll: film couldn’t advance enough for a regular new exposure and the very last one partly overlapped the previous. An image saving error, if you will.
Sofia’s love for pigeons
Posted on August 22, 2013
Bologna, Italy. T-Max 400 developed in Rodinal. Scanned, uncropped.
The Tokyo post
Posted on July 25, 2013
My notes from a recent trip to Tokyo and Kyoto. Written on Kodak Tri-X.
(open the post for full-sized slideshow)
A penny for your thoughts
Posted on July 18, 2013
Girl in a coffee shop, Kyoto, June 2013. Kodak Tri-X 400.
Dogs and owners..
Posted on May 5, 2013
Did anyone say that dogs and their owners often look alike? Anyway, Kodak TMax 400, just scanned.
Another stroll in Venice
Posted on September 16, 2012
A few “street” shots I got the last couple of days in Venice (where there are formally speaking no streets). I wasn’t there to take photos, but had a few hours for myself tried to get something out of them.
No awesome postcards, sorry. Having been in Venice over a hundred times I just can’t.
You may also want to see these others shot from a trip in Venice a year ago: Adagio, Allegro, Venezia
The bill
Posted on May 21, 2012
This post, the last one before my trip to Afghanistan, is about being old and alone, about loneliness.
You figure out a story behind this shot.
No more trains
Posted on May 10, 2012
Very different human stories, the same destiny: a subway station. Not as a short, noisy interlude between home and work or between family life and friends, but itself home, family, friend and only daily occupation.
Some of these people just kept missing the train of their life, the train that could have taken them to a regular office job or to the joys of a happy family. Some others jumped on many trains but were thrown off each and every one of them, humiliated like ticketless passengers.
Invisible border
Posted on April 29, 2012
A couple of centimeters of glass can keep two worlds completely apart. It happens in prisons. It happens in the streets. I took this picture in a busy shopping street of Quartier Latin in Paris, in 2005. On the one side of the window of a fashion store, while their parents do some shopping, two children look at the unaware homeless man sitting just on the other side of the window.
A thin glass plate is the invisible border between young and old, rich and poor, symbolically separating innocent childhood and adult life at its hardest.
(Image awarded the 1st price in the category “snapshot of the month” by National Geographic and published on issue 8/2012 for the Scandinavian countries)
The perfect machine
Posted on March 4, 2012
Few things fit to the definition of “the perfect machine” better than an orchestra. To agree on this, you just need to commit yourself to learning an instrument. It will take you many years of devotion (and frustration) and most likely you’ll never get close to the skills it takes to perform in a real orchestra.
Some years ago I was asked to take a few photos of the Tromsø Chamber Orchestra during a rehearsal. Here are some shots.
Adagio, Allegro, Venezia
Posted on September 23, 2011
What strikes you most when visiting in Venice? Magnificent palaces, timeless atmospheres? No, people, lots of people. Visitors from all over the world crowd Venice at any time of the year, bringing money to some and stress to the rest of the city’s residents. Yet even back in its gold days, “la Serenissima” used to be crowded, the number of its inhabitants at that time being triple than today’s. But things change when the night or the rain comes.
Frøya
Posted on September 15, 2011
