During our lectures at Savignano Festival we met Pietro Millenotti. We enjoyed talking about his series Impronte sull’acqua (Imprints on Water) and the way he chose to represent a human geography as a river flowing. Imprints that left on the water seem to lose weight and to slip faraway on the horizon, as our eye do.
«Framing means to me a severe selection. It is the context itself that suggests me how to deal with it. Is the artificial an extension of the natural? In this image, chosen as cover for the entire project, I sought for a balance between the algid environment and the expectation that the sense of snow releases silently. The sound of a fishy river imagined and made visible only through the projection of a man, although it might not be so.»
«Living along by the banks of a river means to continuously measure the rhythms of nature, far from what is predetermined. Some rigor needs to be maintained for living in this unusual border. A sense of freedom and isolation appear to bring to an almost primitive condition, built around the contemporary tribal marks facing the “people of the mainland”.»
«In the Italian landscape it’s easy to find Christian religious icons and symbols. They often remind us of reached peaks, signs of a path or sacred posts where you stop for meditation. I often wonder how to look at these aspects in relation to the natural environment. In this case, I found the answer in the framing. Although placed in the center, the body of Christ is not the heart of the scene as in “The Baptism” by the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca; it rather reveals its fragility and how small is the death compared to the cyclical renewal that the river naturally suggests to us.»
© All copyright remains with photographer Pietro Millenotti