Once We Were Kidz

"I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn’t planned; it was realism". (Larry Clark)

Once We Were Kidz is a photographic archive revisiting adolescence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, now observed through the distance of time.

Originally created as an intimate visual diary within a close circle of relationships, the work now unfolds as a collective narrative. It reflects on a generation suspended between analog experience and the emergence of digital culture, a moment when life was still lived physically before being constantly mediated by images.

The project was exhibited until 3 May at MA Project in Perugia, curated by Quadro Zero and Marco Frattaruolo.

Through fragments of everyday life such as bedrooms, train stations, bodies, friendships, the project constructs a discontinuous and emotional landscape where memory operates not as documentation but as transformation.

The images, scanned and reactivated after more than twenty years, shift from personal traces into a shared space of recognition. They question how identity is shaped through memory and how the past continues to act within the present.

Rather than nostalgia, Once We Were Kidz explores adolescence as a critical threshold, a brief, intense condition where innocence and awareness coexist and where what we were continues to shape what we are.

The project was published in 2026 as a photobook by Anticamente Presente Editore, expanding the work into an editorial form that reinforces the dialogue between private memory and collective experience.