Phantoms

PHOTOGRAPHER´S NOTES: "What is a ghost? Stephen said. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners." James Joyce, in Ulysses. When the night comes, I believe we all fall into a state somewhere between life and death. This everyday otherworldly experience in which the existence seems to come towards an end, reveal us another nature of the world. *** It was 2011, two months right after the tsunami disaster when I went to Japan. I had already bought the flight tickets, so I decided not to miss the chance and visit the country anyway. Once I got there, I quickly found myself involved in an fragile atmosphere where everything could change at any moment, so every attempt of understanding reality resulted being pointless. On the other hand, it was a period in my life in which I suffered from sleep disorders, so taking photographs at night was part of the routine. This is how I observed that under the influence of the night, big cities like Tokyo, plenty of distractions and daylight joys, unveiled a totally different universe once the mask of the light was being removed: a mass of sleepless people who walked along the streets with no destination at all, immersed completely in a sense of emptiness, solitude and drift. The allegory of the ghost turned soon to become an important part of my photographs, leading the work into the representation of people, of smog, of landscape as in a state of fading into their own shadows, like evanescent organisms that were about to implode, to vanish from real world. This is why "Phantoms" started to reflect also on the aspect of identity: looking toward its ghostly and dark images, do not answer the eternal questions of the self, but confront ourselves with the impact that the environment has on us. "I am here. I know no more than that. I can do no more than that. My boat has no tiller, it sails with the wind that blows in the deepest regions of death" Kafka, in "The huntsman Gracchus".