Intimate collaboration with a stranger
This body of work is the progression from a project that I started last year in London.
Using photography as a means of social-expression, I make pictures about the society, to identify with hidden aspects of their character, to understand someone’s reality and also to express my interpretation of the society around me.
This project is a collaboration between two strangers, the model and me: is a collaboration where the models accept to undress and let me invade their space in the most intimate way but in the same time in the most diffident and distant way: there is no connections, relations or contact between us and most of the time there is no a second encounter.
Within this collaboration I am also able to explore a city, in this case La Rochelle, and its population in a non-touristic way, which is something I wouldn’t be able to do without this project.
What is shown in the picture is not only my relation with the models, but is also my observation on how the identity of the model appears affected from a voyeuristic observation of an unknown other, and the desire of the him/her to be subject of this voyeuristic gaze.
There is always this awkward space where intimacy, privacy, distance and collaboration float confusedly in the photography practice.
And this space is the result of my intimate collaboration with the strangers.