IN MY PLACES

NELLA TARANTINO

// Nella is an architect from Napoli, Italy and has previously photographed in analogue. For about six years she has been devoting herself exclusively to photography, and she has switched to a digital workflow. In her series “In my places” she explores the mystery of landscape.

“Before each shot there is a silent exchange between object and soul, there is an agreement so that reality does not come out as if from a photocopier, but is blocked in a timeless time to infinitely develop the poetry of the gaze, which is for me form and sign of the unconscious.”

Mario Giacomelli

What draws you to the arts?

“I love art in all its forms. I am an architect, and I have always studied form. Through photography, I no longer draw buildings, I try to draw with light. It is a much more difficult goal!”

What do you like best about creating this series of romantic landscape images?

“I almost always realize, and I cannot say whether in the landscapes in which I lose myself, it is a question of places or of faces, of figures, and, then, in the photographs, that I find myself facing, each time, to something both familiar and unknown, as if these places, these figures, these faces, had always been part of my deepest landscape, and at the same time, I see them for the first time, like dream places, unknown figures and faces. When this happens, I feel that a small miracle has happened, I feel that it is “good photography” which has succeeded in penetrating “a timeless time to infinitely develop the poetry of the gaze, which is for me, form and sign of the unconscious”. Like a fatality, through a wound, this photograph detaches itself painfully from me and approaches to capture me, as in a reverse process to the shooting, in the unfathomable mystery of its appearance.”

“It’s getting bad. You have to hurry if you still want to see anything. Everything disappears,”
Paul Cézanne

Colour returns in this latest collection of Nella´s photographs, in a series of romantic landscapes from her home country Italy.

Nella explains the series in her own poetic words: “It is not the colour that is the essence, it is the duration, the realization of things. It seems that there is nothing left, only vast, mysterious landscapes, incredibly distant from their origins. Exhausted and lost and immobilized in their inaccessible distance. Immersed in a painful twilight light. Yes, because it is not the “rising” of the landscape. From absolute darkness. It is the return, after the last glow, like a disappointment, like the end of a long journey, like an infinite tiredness. Miraculously, fragments of a flying soul reappear, visions that proceed towards alchemical transmutations, before the darkness closes on every gash, on every shore, on every sky. Mists and foams and cumulus clouds, undone suns and reflections of sky and sea, surprised moons fleeing the night, and rocks and reefs and romantic landscapes like postcards from a forgotten journey. No wanderer ventures to the heights of their own pride. Just an immense inexpressible silence. No beyond. Among the dense vapors of water and sand we receive snapshots of a single irreversible sunset, the painful agony of the beauty of nature that is gone.”

You might also be interested to see Nella´s black and white work, which we have previously featured in an article entitled “Where silence reigns“.

Click on the photos to see the full image .