PERFECT STRANGERS

Cristina Scalabrini has long been a fiction translator for various publishing houses. For years she has been editor of photo books for Rizzoli-Mondadori. For her personal projects she began photographing in film, black and white. She currently shoots dig

Time passes, and loved ones disappear. Leafing through old photo albums is no longer the same as it used to be. Every loss is a wound, and the wounds accumulate in an indistinct burning sensation, made of poignant nostalgia, remorse, and sometimes resentment.

         And I finally understood why, for some time now, the less I open old albums, the more I search for and buy old photos of strangers. In these photos there is a past that is not mine, a total absence of bonds and shared experiences, of relationships, memories, affection, remorse, regret, anger. There is nothing left, and nothing belongs to anyone anymore.

         Rescued from the past and oblivion, people, animals, objects and places are freed from the heaviness of nostalgia and become pure air and lightness. They are reassuring images: just beautiful, or curious, or strange, or simple enough to calm the mind. In one word, empty.

         By organizing this collection of perfect strangers, I create a world of perfect unknown people. To make them truly distant from me, I insert them into the objectivity of the external world, into the pragmatic neutrality of science, of matter, of tangible reality, of “truth”.

         Macrocosm and microcosm insinuate themselves into the images and form a new liberating dimension; another reassuring and intangible world to which, ultimately, I bond.