THE BLUE DREAM

Born in Bari in 1964, Bibolotti studied foreign languages before moving to France, where she lived and worked as a teacher for six years in Paris and Nice. Her relationship with photography began in the 1980s through her discovery of photographers including Edward Weston, Mimmo Jodice, Mario Giacomelli and Lucien Clergue. Their command of light and form had a lasting influence on the way she learned to see.

When she was given her first SLR camera, an old Pentax Spotmatic, photography became much more than a means of recording the world around her. Taking photographs and developing them in her own darkroom offered her a way to express emotions that could not easily be articulated otherwise. The process was intimate and physical: exposure, darkness, waiting and the gradual emergence of an image.

Her transition from analogue to digital photography opened a different field of experimentation. Alma became fascinated by the possibilities of post-processing and its ability to emphasise, alter or liberate forms and textures. Yet the digital process did not replace the contemplative nature of her work. Instead, it gave her additional means of exploring the relationship between external reality and the unconscious.

Today, much of Alma’s photography is centred on landscape and nature. She is particularly drawn to those elements that are easily overlooked: organic structures, mineral surfaces and fleeting arrangements that resist immediate recognition. By isolating and transforming them, she challenges conventional perception and allows their emotional and symbolic qualities to emerge.

Her images often reduce forms to their simplest elements. Detail is present, but certainty is withheld. Rather than explaining the natural world, Alma distils it into visual metaphors for an inner experience. The landscape becomes psychological; the organic becomes mysterious. Simple natural elements appear to open passages into parallel worlds, enabling outer reality to give voice to the inner gaze.

Her work has received recognition in numerous international competitions, including the Prix de la Photographie Paris, the Budapest International Foto Awards, the Tokyo International Foto Awards, the ND Awards and the Fine Art Photography Awards. It has appeared in publications including L’Oeil de la Photographie and Dodho Magazine and has been exhibited at festivals such as Trieste Photo Days, Montecchio Fotografia’s La Luce Scritta and OFF, and the Ostuni Foto Festival.

What draws you to the arts?

For me, all arts are very important; they are the heart of my life experience. When I started to use my first camera, I realised that I could express something that is rooted inside: since then, photography has been an inner journey vital to me.

What do you like best about this project?

First of all, the dreamlike quality of these photos. They are the result of an immersive exploration of nature’s ephemeral fragments as a work of introspection. I think I have been deeply influenced by Surrealism, so I love challenging conventional perceptions to create something that resonates emotionally.

In The Blue Dream, Alma’s dialogue with nature becomes especially immersive. Flowers, shells, algae and feathers are arranged into assemblages and then transformed through a digital process. She layers images, distorts their original colours and introduces indigo tonalities, allowing unexpected visual relationships and partly random effects to arise. Recognisable forms dissolve, merge and reappear as something new.

Soft, folded shapes may initially suggest petals, wings or translucent underwater life, yet no single interpretation settles completely. Areas of fine texture emerge from expanses of luminous blue, while violet and green drift through the background. The images feel both intimate and immense: a close observation of organic matter.

Alma describes the series as an exploration of nature’s “secret alchemy” and its endless metamorphosis. The digital intervention is therefore not merely decorative. It continues a process already present in nature, where forms are continually unfolding, decaying, combining and becoming something else. Through colour shifts, superimposition and distortion, she searches for what she calls the spiritual language of nature—an unconscious syntax revealed through relationships between shape, texture and colour.

Blue plays a central role in establishing this visual and emotional space. Alma refers to Rudolf Steiner’s observation that blue leads us towards an inner perspective and a realm of feeling in which spiritual truth may be found. In these images, blue is not simply a colour applied to natural objects. It is an atmosphere that removes them from ordinary time and gives them a meditative, almost immaterial presence.

For Alma, this movement between outer and inner experience extends beyond photography. Art in all its forms is central to her life because it allows something deeply rooted within us to take form. Since she first began using a camera, photography has remained a vital inner journey—a practice of attention, discovery and emotional necessity.

In The Blue Dream, that necessity is expressed through a quiet but persistent search: for what lies beneath appearances, for the emotional charge contained in the smallest natural fragment, and for the invisible point at which matter becomes imagination.