This work irrigates my heart with water like fish in their burrows, because it has been the excuse, in addition to fly fishing, to return to the river every time, in any type of weather, leaving aside everything else. The water of a river has been, is and always will be the place of my spiritual formation and closeness with those primordial elements that Norman Maclean identifies in the rocks of the riverbed, James Joyce in the nocturnal flow, Tarkovskji in the ocean of eternity, Bruce Springsteen in the jazz melody of his black inhabitants, Ungaretti in the roots of experience.
On the shoulders of these giants I went to the river to fish with the fly carrying with me my camera and a couple of waders to immerse myself up to the breastbone, and listen to the water flowing all around my being inside. From the perspective of the fisherman, I photographed everything the river brought me above and below the surface. The gentle rustling so implied by the silence of the rat tail through the rings of the cane, the Victorian lightness of the dry fly is the reason that pushed me and pushes me to look below, beyond the current, inside the rocks, among the algae, between the trees on the banks, where a trout is hiding, and to relate myself to this unconscious depth: an elsewhere.
On the shoulders of these giants I went to the river to fish with the fly carrying with me my camera and a couple of waders to immerse myself up to the breastbone, and listen to the water flowing all around my being inside. From the perspective of the fisherman, I photographed everything the river brought me above and below the surface. The gentle rustling so implied by the silence of the rat tail through the rings of the cane, the Victorian lightness of the dry fly is the reason that pushed me and pushes me to look below, beyond the current, inside the rocks, among the algae, between the trees on the banks, where a trout is hiding, and to relate myself to this unconscious depth: an elsewhere.
And this elsewhere is what I try to photograph as an obsession, full of limits, as I am aware that the only image is very little compared to its complex meaning. Words which now I can’t find any longer, after devoting myself to the tale and poetry in my younger age, would be needed. The obsession with waters is the condition of those who are painfully convinced of losing precious time when they are not on the river. When they are busy doing anything other than fly fishing, sitting on the pebbles on the shore watching a flood, or hanging their head off a bridge to see trout hunting, whatever they are doing is wasting time.
The camera (like the art of building artificial flies, which I practice despite being basically hopeless) and the work in the studio in the printing process allows me to take home a lived and practiced idea, and to dampen the nostalgia in the memory of being there. I consider photography and printing two phases of the same process, I feel more like an engraver than a photographer, and I prefer Albrecht Durer or Hercules Segers to Stephen Shore or Ansel Adams.
