This Hard Land

Music can be a great deal of inspiration for a photographer, for sure Springsteen songs have been a huge inspiration for me. Stories told in his songs are so full of visual details that one could even argue Springsteen is a photographer himself. My aim was to picture his songs and contemporary United States through them: the working class condition, the middle class crisis, the American Dream, broken but still alive, immigration and all the social and cultural fractures in Trump's America. Work is one of the most important topics in his songs: Springsteen's workers belong to underqualified tertiary industries of the suburbs and the sprawl of American cities, their jobs lack inspiration, according to the Boss himself. So these people try to climb the social ladder, and that's the American Dream, the hope that children will have better lives than their parents. This is the most painfully broken promise of the American Dream. The context of Springsteen stories are always very diverse, but tipically they involve workplaces: car washes, car workshops, supermarkets, laundromats, diners, factories. And you can also have: homes, usually at nighttime, cars, both claustrophobic closed spaces and liberation symbols, the sprawl, with its scale of grey that resembles a parking lot. And the night, as a salvation route, theathre of all escapes. During the night, they pack, they dress up, feel lonely and scared. In evocative nightly images, Springsteen characters never stop riding, like in a neverending movie. Endless asphalt strips lead their dreams to some final accomplishment, or at least this is how they feel or hope. They dream to leave, but one never leaves alone. Escape is something you do better as a couple: women are the cornerstone of the world. They never know where they will get to, they have no idea of where this Promised Land may be. The night, the road, a couples: these are the frames of the runaway. They are workers, fathers and sons, outlaws, veterans that after the war have found a new uniform: the working class army. And of course they are women: workers, lovers, travel companions, friends, mothers. It is only with the presence of a woman that a man can find his fulfilment. Through my project I've told these stories and this topics forty years after the time Springsteen wrote his songs and this is made clear in the pictures: stories are different, expectations have changed.