Portfolio Category - Portrait Awards 2014

All portraits come from my work 0°30’38.981" N, 32°46’25.948" E that is a reportage about an unknown and unnamed African community. Its Inhabitants recognize nature as mother and teacher. Everything belongs to everyone and the community seems to act in the common interests, so progress and development is low and gradual. My final aim is to display a remarkable and collective intelligence, often unknown to us, which connects human being, animals and plants. In made-poor countries, children are the first victims of the loss of alimentary self-sufficiency. So I focused especially on children portraying them with what is dearest to their lives: the plants, the animals, the games, the shelters. That's a work about a world where mankind lives simply and harmoniously with the surrounding nature. These communities are quite common in Africa and are going through an exceptional historical moment. the most of them are in a post-revolutionary and almost pre-industrial stage, a period not so different from when Diderot and Rousseau believed nature was able to regulate itself, and that human society had to be built around it, but they have an advantage, though: they know about the negative, self-destructing example we have set. In addition they are educated and well aware of several ecological limitations. They are careful not to turn the usage of natural resources into a systematic plundering. We lost this opportunity a long time ago. Not a exotic paradise of a travel agency, not a representation of the poverty, not a theatre of war. The protagonist of this story is a normal and indipendent Africa.