DANCING WITH GHOSTS

When Alessandra Berto picked up a camera for the first time at the age of 57, she was answering a long-silenced creative calling—one that had been shadowed by reverence and fear. Her father, an accomplished amateur photographer recognised by both Nikon and Pentax, had set a standard so high that it took years, and his passing, for Alessandra to feel free to explore the medium herself. But when she finally did, something remarkable happened.

Having taken only a few private photography lessons, armed with a Nikon Z50, new lenses, and a spirit wide open to experimentation, Alessandra plunged into a world where motion, colour, and emotion blur into one.

Now a member of several photography communities including Moments Collective, Street Photography France, and The Street Soup (permanent collection, Milan), Alessandra is firmly stepping into the space she once hesitated to enter.

But unlike the sharp stillness of traditional portraiture, her lens follows a different rhythm—one that embraces the blur, the movement, and the ghostly magic of lives in motion.

What draws you to the arts?

Art makes me feel alive and full of emotion.

What do you like best about this project?

These techniques permit me to make the invisible visible. They create a world of ghosts: creatures moving, laughing, dancing in spite of what life often obliges us to face.

In her dance series, she embraces long-exposure and intentional camera movement (ICM) techniques, capturing bodies mid-flight, figures in spin, and the joyous unpredictability of people in motion. The results are painterly, expressive, and unrepeatable—images that feel like they exist in a liminal world between physical presence and memory. Alessandra explores the boundaries between presence and absence, visibility and spirit. Her figures do not pose—they blur, drift, and reappear like painted traces of emotion, offering a poetic meditation on movement, creativity, and the unseen rhythms of life.

Alessandra says she rarely shoots in black and white. For her, colour is essential—“I love colours and I choose to use them fully.” It shows. In works like Dance for Chango, or Flamenco01, the hues pulse with energy, each swirl of fabric or gesture of the arm etched in a blur that’s both ephemeral and timeless. But this isn’t just about aesthetic effect. Through this camera technique, Alessandra captures not just bodies in motion but the very essence of movement itself, layering time and colour into painterly, dreamlike impressions.

Driven by an instinctive love of art and its ability to awaken emotion, she creates imagery that feels alive—vivid moments of joy, grace, and energy that reflect her deeply personal vision. She transforms fast, fleeting gestures—especially in dance—into painterly, dreamlike compositions. Her images are not simply photographs; they are vibrant traces of energy, moments made visible that would otherwise slip past unseen.

For Alessandra, movement is metaphysical. There’s a deep tenderness in this—the sense that even in grief or transition, there is vitality and grace in what escapes our grasp.

Dance, for her, is the perfect metaphor. “Dance is grace, is body expression, is art, elegance. And the dancers appear as lightly painted on canvas.” And yet there’s also humour and spontaneity in images like Good Times and Funny Ghosts, suggesting that for Alessandra, the art of seeing is as much about joy as it is about reverence.