Dies Irae / Paolo Pellegrin

I felt that i had to share this beautiful thought found on the book DIES IRAE by Paolo Pellegrin-for the unlucky ones who don’t know him-here the biography. This is just a small piece of a very interesting interview/discussion with Roberto Koch(Contrasto founder) and I strongly believe that those sentences should be stick in every photographers’s mind.

“Ever since I began working in photography in the early nineties, I’ve heard about this golden age, which is that of LIFE. 

But personally, during the nineties I did very little work for newspapers because I was still in a self-imposed training phase. It’s a phase, apart from the rest, that’s never completely finished and I imagine that will continue forever…It’s just about trying to find my own voice and let it become a written photography. In this sense, I happen to think of photography as foreign language. Learning to connect with this voice and speak through photography, learning to express oneself through this language-listening to the rules and to instincts at the same time-is something and complex. The question isn’t how to take good photos, It’s how to take good photographs that succeed to do a number of things simultaneously: to document, to transmit information, and to strike emotion chord. Initially I studied architecture, then I took some photography courses and then I put myself through a period of eight, maybe ten years of rigorous training where i had to learn to express myself in this language of photography.

For years i worked on this-on the gaze, vision-shooting by day and printing by night.”

PP 

Chasing a Dream. Europe

I have recently read Bilal(unlikely I couldn’t find any English version), written by Fabrizio Gatti, an Italian journalist for the weekly magazine L'espresso.

The book tells the stories of many people who every day risk their life chasing the dream of reaching Europe, no matter how. The price for they dreamed journey is expansive, nearly 2000 € (Euros), which will just pay the trip from the north coasts of Africa to the southern regions of Europe, such money will not include the money payed for the trip trough the Sahara desert and the money stole by the army and the police! Working in all sorts of conditions and fields, even selling water for they fellow dreamers that will start the long trip trough the desert, those people do literally anything that will start their journey…

It’s well known that many of them don’t reach Europe nor the northern coast of Africa, paying the most expansive price, their LIVES. Bilal also talk about the ones who finally arrive in Europe, facing the often very cloudy way to obtain a job and a life.

This is an extremely short description of the magnificent work of Fabrizio Gatti, but also another occasion to speak and remember the brave of those people.

The photos below show the boats which departing from the coasts of Tunisia and Libya, are used to cross the Sicilian channel and reach Lampedusa, also called “the door of Europe”.