ONE, NO ONE AND ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND
Marco Ristuccia submitted his portfolio to Urbanautica. Of all his works I have been immediately struck by a project. Its title reminded me of a book by Luigi Pirandello and an intense period of my life. Not only that, I know and love the river landscape that he has portrayed. It is a romantic and melancholic representation that captures the true spirit of those places. I asked Marco to tell us a bit more about it…
Steve Bisson
«This project comes from a reflection and a research on the essence of things, thought to be applicable to any living organism, but in this case targeted to a specific one: the tree.
So, taking into account the trees, it is a fact that even individuals of the same species have a distinct personal appearance that characterizes each of them as being a unique creature in the world. However, beyond the inevitable differences in the specific field, if we move our point of view to the universal field, it is clear that all of them have common characteristics. And indeed what makes them a species is just the fact of sharing specific structures and shapes well described in scientific textbooks of biology: “the tree is a plant with roots, a tall, thick and hard woody stem called trunk, and a crown made of branches usually covered with leaves.” These macro-features are the essence of all living species, that’s what remains if we eliminate the superfluous, if we exclude the particular characteristics».
«With my photographic project I would like to obtain this, to extract only the essence, the soul of the trees. And I tried to achieve this through the technique of overlapping images. The fusion of different shots in a single final frame will help to “reinforce” what is common to the trees and to rather “blur” the characteristics of the single specimen.
The project was realized along the Po Valley, in the northern Italy. Each final photograph is composed by around ten to fifteen single shots. I have deliberately chosen the fading light, which is typical of that place in the cloudy days, to give a rather misty and graphical aesthetic to the final work».
© All copyright remains with photographer Marco Ristuccia