What you are looking at here
It's since 2011 that I started to take photos on my way: in every public space where I've been in my daily life. They are candid photos, stolen shots, captured by my smartphones. Furthermore they are blind shots, made by my hand at chest or hip height, without my eyes support. However, they are not exactly instant shots because all my photos are selected and edited.
I know these candid photos are suspicious and often create discomfort because of their subject: always the same. It was pointed out to me that street or documentary photography should be focus on all the subjects in the urban spaces. “You can take candid photos of girls only if you shoot also males, elders or children, social minorities...”. It seems that girls and young women can be the focus of photographers only if they are models. It is curious that in photography the subjects of the most classic form of beauty - that female in sacred and profane arts - must be fall only under the fashion or erotic or advertising fields, that is, being the object of commercialization. It sounds both rather patriarchal and consumerist, isn’t?
When my secondary blog "Metro Torino" (2013-2014) - a daily-updated photo series featuring portraits of Turin subway passengers - went under the local press and web campaign, I was defined as a 'stalker.' It wasn't important that a century earlier photographers, like Walker Evans, had taken similar photos on the subway: the scandal was in portraying only girls. On that occasion, a photographer and exhibition curator friend of mine told me that I had violated a taboo. So, I closed that photoblog, waited a few months for the hate campaign to subside and reopened this ‘Tumblr’ in February 2015. Since then the question I ask myself and probably yours too, when you look at these photographs, is always the same: which taboo is being violating here?
Thank you for reading and
Kind regards,
(alias) Little William
Screenshot of a press article about "Metro Torino" in 2014