Lux Voluit Photography Blog

One afternoon a few years ago, a recently met colleague offered me a walk around his city. We share the same passion for photography and so for me, a stranger who is always alone in the evening, the proposal is indispensable, the city is Verona, the colleague is Pasquale. We walk together, we chat about this and that and take a snapshot, then the discussion gets deeper and deeper, and we find friends in a short time; photography does not always steal the souls of the subjects, at times it unites and transforms them. Pasquale is a restless elf who gets up and down, who clicks and stops and who hides behind his chiaroscuro that make him look gloomy and lonely, except that when you need him he is there and listens to you without judging you. . That's why when I look at his photographs I feel emotions, the same ones I feel when I spend a day with him taking pictures or drinking a good beer chatting about this and that.

The acquaintance with Pasquale has a long wave, which began in 2007 when the destinies of work met at the convergence of our societies. I immediately appreciated his good character, shy, never bulky, as he knows how to be a good family man; but when he gets angry, open heaven. Photographic passion, let's face it, is pure contagious emotion. Like a virus, he spread through the office at the time, sowing from time to time, followers everywhere, first all Canonists, then Fujistas. But it's not the machine that makes the difference, it's the heart. And in Pasquale's shots, which I was finally able to add to the work, on the occasion of a beautiful and exhausting trip together in Cologne, the heart is the precision in the search for the shot. In the maniacal waiting. And the result is there, in black and white.

ISO ... dynamic range ... apertures ... white balance ... AE / AF lock ... noise reduction ... exposure ... "No, I can't do it ... I will never be able to do it." When my shaky hands first caressed the Fujifilm X-E1 just bought by my colleague, those words rang in my mind like a mantra. But perhaps, thinking about it in hindsight, it was just a matter of finding a 'support', or we could better say a 'tripod' since we are talking about photography, something that would help to have stability. This was for me the meeting with Pasquale and with his personal way of understanding photography. Nadar said: “In photography there are, as in all things, people who know how to see and others who can't even look”. Here, Pasquale helped me to look at the situations of life, at nature, at the world, with different eyes; he helped me to observe and discover their most hidden side, to always search for 'interesting situations', as he likes to call them, those that often only a careful and curious glance can grasp. We colleagues, a little joking but perhaps not too much, like to call him a 'master'; and he frowns when he hears us say that. But if it is true, as I personally believe it is, that "a teacher opens the door in which you must enter alone" (Chinese proverb) ... well ... maybe that definition is not that far away for him. And I close by thinking about the photographs I have taken so far, the fact that I am still a long way from those first 10,000 photos that Henri Cartier Bresson indicated as being his worst. This is to tell you, my friend, a very simple thing: “Don't you think I don't need you anymore? We understood each other, right? "