A Neutral Place

In these photographs that Sortini has called "his strolls," there is a photographic story, but it is a kind of crossover in which photography asks a series of questions about the identity of a place and about the emotional aspect of being in a place. So we find that the images of these cities are, in some respects, deliberately complicated because the place isn't recognisable. In fact the birds-eye view of a city reveals its fundamental characteristics in relation to its territory, its structure, its focal points. Once upon a time the image from the above of a walled city was easily read: the city walls clearly delimited the border with respect to the country, the urban fabric was homogeneous, with few easily recognisable focal points, the church, the town hall, the market square. Today the image of our cities is much more complex and confusing. Their spatial qualities rarely define the functions of its parts and its buildings. Today we are choked and suffocated by a planning design that has surrounded us with a cannibalistic metropolis, with a squalid city that lacks a sense of order, with a sad countryside that coasts the edges of our rail roads and highways, dotted with petty, purely utilitarian, buildings, sparsely shaded by lamp posts and polluted by petrol fumes.