Santa Elemosina

These portraits were taken as “santini” – the small images of saints that some devoted elderly people carry in their wallets as protective and talismanic icons. These individu- als, photographed in such a way as to reproduce the for- mat and the iconography of the very icons that they carry are thus presented, embedded in the compartments of a drawer as if in many little tabernacles. They themselves resemble the santini. Yet they are the saints, the beggars, who direct their gaze upon us with the intent to generate the same emotions as those induced by the saints of the santini.