Santa Monica

Since I moved to SantaMonica, I’ve been fascinated by its residential neighborhoods and their “flip side”, the back alleys. Hidden from the apparent uniformity of the streets, there are clues, objects, messages that tell us who we are, what we believe in and how different we are from each other. It seems to me that, as human beings, we have a constant need to express ourselves and one of the most effective ways to do this is through the possession and display of objects that become symbols of our individuality.Think of the importance of objects in cultures and religions, entire museums are crammed with artifacts of every origin, meaning&make. I, myself have a particular fondness for objects. I feel their deep symbolic value and I collect and exhibit the things I like, find or buy in my home because I feel the need to communicate my inner world through their display. I think they are a reflection of my personality. So it comes natural to me, as I walk through the deserted alleys of SantaMonica, to notice these little clues, and to take pictures of them. Indeed, the collection of these photographs (almost 200!) reveals to me a very playful, ironic, sometimes funny, surreal aspect of the people in SantaMonica, a city that seems completely ordinary, even boring, where you rarely encounter much human presence during a walk.These photographs are portraits of us, the citizens. An on-going work on American society and its contradictions in the alleys in SantaMonica, Californi