To my mum

Sometimes my photos are just waiting for me in a certain spot, at a certain time, through a certain light, that I just need to reach and capture. I see them getting bigger as I get closer, and I can describe them even before they become a thing. It feels like a hunting session, like I'm in control of my creative journey. Then come different circumstances, in which I must abandon myself to the frustration of seeing nothing, nothing worth the effort. Happens quite oftenly to be honest, so what to do? After all these years of suffering under my perfectionism, now I just take some photos and hope for the best. "go with the flow" they say.

So yesterday I went to the beach for the first time after more than a year; it was a local bay, with all kinds of services for families with kids, and people that can't afford to travel further. I would visit places like these when I was little, and again as a teenager, cause there's plenty of nightlife in the area. The sea is absolutely pale with pollution, but the air has a certain familiar fragrance to it, that healed months of stress in a day. By the time of the golden hour, I felt like trying for a shooting session, thinking I'd probably hate every picture and delete them. Today I checked them in a rush - cause you know how I like to do things last-minute - and immediately started to think of my mother.

When you're an adult with a conflictual relationship with your parents, to see parts of them in yourself is never easy. Well, to me, these photos are the perfect portrait of the influence my mum had on me. That's me wearing my handmade bikini on a random summer evening, but that's also her, at my exact age, taking photos of her newborn daughter and collecting them in albums she would carefully decorate; that's her religiously keeping up with this tradition at any given sunset, at any given interesting landscape, or memorable occasion. She would photograph her love for me, without any care for the art, just hoping to stop time, to fix a memory. Is it also why I do take photos of me? In the attempt to express love, or to spare me from the cruelty of time? All these thoughts awakened by a bunch of ugly pictures. What a journey! She still wants to portray me all the time, with a certain insistence that pisses me off, and now I don't even know how to feel about it. Damn she would even crochet things for me, and look at what I'm wearing here!

I had no other choice but to dedicate this first set of July to the firsts person that made me feel like the most beautiful subject. Oh, I tried to replicate some sort of a sepia filter, cause I remember it was considered cool when I was little; it's ok if you don't like it <3