THE PROJECT

Beware of the dog is the journey to maturity, the transition in which desire, the idea of death, and the scars caused by the passing of time all appear. These concepts replace the space that fiction occupies when we are children, with “reality”, and awareness of the adult world.

But where are the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual, between tangibility and faith, between fear and trust? How far can we appeal to fantasy to fill the void of the inexplicable and the unknown?

The loss of innocence means realizing whether or not your fears are really yours or other people’s, and whether your imagination is going to keep on saving you or not. But it also means progressively abandoning the now, to get invariably trapped between what was and what will be.

THE PROCESS

No photograph of this project was taken for this project.

In September 2016, going through my archive, I came across the image that would end up being the inspiration for the whole project: an old wooden fence lying at the side of a road. Above it, a small metallic sign in yellow letters: BEWARE OF THE DOG. I immediately thought that we do not really fear the dog but the idea of the dog, and that fear is much more powerful when it is the fruit of imagination.

Revisiting photos taken between 2014 and 2017, mostly while travelling with my wife and my two daughters across England, Spain, France & Morroco, I started linking visual metaphors to gradually put together this narrative. Each pair of photographs establishes a formal and conceptual dialogue between the two images, enhancing its narrative, and often creating new invented spaces where doubt arises about what is real and what is imaginary.