I thought that, with time, all the questions I have been asking myself for years about my relationship with photography would be resolved.

To give evidence of a world in continuous change?, To provoke feelings?, Poke around in the consciences?, Hedonistic exercise? Selfish Utilitarianism?, Memory sustenance?

Far from it, a multitude of possible answers remain open.

Doing photography: a crude attempt to usurp from Life infinitesimal parts of its Time - that merciless God - to recompose them in whimsical combinations of light and shadow, creating illusory windows to the outside world but also to the inner one.

I hardly ever photograph objects, monuments or landscapes, which, if anything, are mere decorations accompanying a single protagonist: the human being, with his strengths and miseries, with his yearnings and frustrations, with his laughter and tears.

And I can't remember a single one of my photographs in which, at the moment of shooting, I have not been accompanied by the deep conviction that only chance or even time are the single reason why I’m not that old man from a remote tribe, that devotee in ecstasy inside a madrassa, that beggar sheltering from the rain under the tin or that nouveau riche who disdains everything that doesn't concern him in the first person.

I do not photograph what I see but what I am.

I never think of my photographs as art objects or consumer items, they have nothing to do with ephemerality either. I think of them as tools at the service of a simple idea so masterfully summarized by Wayne Miller: the universal truths of being human.

I firmly believe that the value of a photograph is shared, at least in equal parts, between the photographer and his models, who tolerate and accept his presence, who endure on many occasions his intrusion and insolence, and who in the end, converted into paper and unaware of the passage of time, allow themselves to be observed, returning to us, like mirrors, some unknown part of ourselves.