THE ONLY ONE TO BE DIFFERENT IS YOU
«The idea of addressing with my photography the topic ‘Teenager’ stems almost as a challenge against those who unjustly ride with sensational sights negative events involving young people in general. The subtle side of the thing, however, is that despite the small numbers and percentages of these, and often with the complicity of the media, the category of young people is reflected as inept, violent, apathetic and mass, thus generalizing thereby discrediting the life in the making. On the contrary, I believe that youth is the most real force for a positive intellectual, cultural and moral change of our world. So I decided to get in touch through a simple medium, close to their times and that would allow me to enter in connection with their lives: the camera. What was missing was the place where they would feel right, a space that would have represented them. The choice was the bedroom, their bedroom: a space more than a place, lived in full by some, and minimally by others. A social and intimate space, where mutations leave traces and, sometimes, graffiti that remain or dissolve under the inexorably passage of time. Here, evolutions, transformations, and codes that change by age and status can be intuited. A Tower of Babel that suggests different personalities and attitudes. The rooms are similar to the showcases that the hero of Salinger’s The catcher in the rye observes in the Museum of Natural History: ‘The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move… Nobody’d be different. The one thing that would be different would be you’. Some masks drops or even falls down, the verb assigns to the silence and the self manifests itself encouraged by those who wish to hear and listen. Young people certainly have much to tell. This I think is the most hidden desire that each of them has: knowing that someone is interested in their thoughts, their dreams and their utopias. Someone who thinks that these generations are up more than those who judge them. The protagonists of this series – realized in 2010 – live in Valtiberina, Central Italy.»
© All copyright remains with photographer Stefano Giogli