Operai

A personal vision of a job that may seem ordinary, silent, invisible to some, but which in reality is the life of a large group of people throughout Italy and the world, and is what keeps our system.

Industrial photography has usually brought the factory to the forefront, taking charge of documentation, the production process and the relationship with the territory. At other times, however, it has portrayed the architecture and spaces in a majestic and scenographic way, highlighting the unique charm and almost magical presence of the buildings and places that make it up.

I wanted to channel my attention to the people who live in those places, who are a cog in the wheel and take care of it. I wanted to devote myself to the people in the factory: the only truly indispensable element in bringing the industrial world into being.

I felt I could tell the story of the inhabitants of this universe, I was the first to be able to do so, not as a spectator, but as a worker.

First, thanks to my father, to his work as a factory worker, I found within the walls of my home gestures, smells, habits and above all the morals that characterise the world of the factory. Then came the blue overalls for me too. And so I discovered further dynamics: workers who are proud of their work, jealous of their tool, intimately linked to their job, people who live their days marked by the four sounds of the siren and who record the beginning and end of their working hours with their working badge in their hands. In a whirlwind, where the morning is the same as the night and where everything begins and then ends and then begins again in the same place.

A personal vision of a job that may seem ordinary, silent, invisible to some, but which in reality is the life of a large group of people throughout Italy and the world, and is what keeps our system, our everyday life, going. A vision made up of glimpses of life inside and outside the factory, which aims to recompose from the particular to the universal, what may be the reality of those who devote their lives, because they want to, have to or because it happened to them, to this sacred world that is the worker. Images, but also words that tell a piece of a story and many other stories, long and sparse in our society lives.