Qualcosa di nuovo sotto il sole

It strikes me that this is precisely it: an image that manages to leave the subject intact, without devouring it either in formal ecstasy or in a moral thesis.

There is a kind of journey that requires no crossing of borders or distances, and yet exhausts the traveller no less than a real pilgrimage on foot.

It is the journey of those who, with their gaze, scan the vast, ever-deepening, indecipherable flow of images that the world produces every day, driven by the sheer need to keep watching a world that is changing far too quickly – like the hermit who withdraws not from the world but into it, into a cell made of screens and reflected light rather than stone. He too, like the Saturnian wayfarers (W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn), he too proceeds alone, without a stated destination, through a landscape that to others appears flat and repetitive—row upon row of almost identical shots—yet which, to those who linger long enough, reveals cracks, ripples and details that resist the flattening effect of the gaze within a changing world.

On this motionless journey, one occasionally stumbles upon an image that has eluded its fate of being consumed and forgotten in an instant: a crooked, out-of-focus shot, cut in half by a distracted hand, rejected by every conventional standard, and yet still there, having survived precisely because no one deemed it worthy of being corrected or deleted.

The hermit-wayfarer pauses before these images just as one pauses, whilst walking through an uninhabited countryside, before the remains of an animal or a dense thicket of indecipherable branches.