Core
Essere sempre se stessi, essere sempre veri
Always be yourself, always be real.
Come se fossi io, come se fossi tu.
As if it were me, as if it were you.
Tutte le mie giornate iniziano pensando al mio amore e con lo stesso pensiero si concludono.
All of my days start thinking of my love and they end with the same thought.
Se con lo sguardo si dice molto, allora la verità è negli occhi di chi ti sta guardando.
If the eyes can say so many things, then the truth lays in the eyes of the one who’s looking at you.
Non c’è solo quello che si vuol vedere. C’è molto altro nella mia vita c’è gioia e amore.
There isn’t only what they want to see. There’s so much more in my life, there’s love and joy.
Libera di essere creativa... Ogni giorno è un nuovo giorno.
Free of being creative… Every day is a brand new day.
Ciò che serve nella vita è semplicemente amore.
All you need in your life is merely love.
Fiero di essere ciò che sono, e di fare ciò che faccio, non faccio male a nessuno.
Proud of being who I am, of doing what I do, I don’t hurt anyone.
This photography project has been made in the neighbourhood of Catania called San Berillo. It shows one of the Belle at the entrance of the house where she works.
Other works
This photography project has been made in the neighbourhood of Catania called San Berillo. It shows one of the Belle at the entrance of the house where she works.
Streets of San Berillo
Streets of San Berillo
Streets of San Berillo
Fasi di produzione/production steps
The photographs describe some of the project processing steps and they were taken by the assistants with their smartphones. The choice of technology history aims to avoid that other photographic devices could affect the intimacy and the game which is established between subject and photographer. During the shooting, I have always been followed by two assistants. The assistants who have collaborated in the project are: Alessia Trovato, Paolo Catalano, Giampiero Gangi, Gabriele Raimondo, Cinzia Sparacino, Debora
Le Belle
It has been decided to not have a documentaristic and impersonal approach. Establishing a close relationship allowed to create an open narrative, including both good and very emotionally touching memories.
The intimate vibe that you feel while watching the portratis, underlines a confidential relationship with the artist. Each and evry shot has been created in accord with the character, therefore the caption and the title of the work represent a message that had decided the same subjects.
Despite the bad conditions of the environment where they live, every message owns an amazing positive actitude and an endless desire of not giving up on life.
The work has been realized in Catania, inside the San Berillo neiborhood.
Born as a working-class district in the second half of 19th Century, between the two World Wars, it has become already one of the biggest areas of the city. There was plenty of all kind of small shops, theatres and brothels.
Many years of wrong city plannings, unauthorised buildings, became known as the “Eviteration of San Berillo”. All these abuses, had destroyed almost completetly the district which today is composed just of the few historic remaining streets.
A progressively lower presence of structured housing units and the geographic form, permitted the neiborhood to become one of the most famous red-light districts of the island.
Inside a more then ever puritan Sicily of the first half of the 20th Century, a ghetto in the very historic center but far away from the view of the city.
The tendency had accentuated during the following decades, allowing the settlement inside the district of pleanty of prostitutes and “trapping” between their borders almost all the Transgenders that were sex-workers in the city.
Derelict houses next to buildings that has been affected by serious collapses, walled-up doors consequently to the several police roundups of the first years of the 21st Century and the following squattings, make the district a multiethnic and multicultural universe composed of inhabitants that live surrounded by an atmosphere of a never-ending abandonment.
This work is not just a series of prostitutes’ portraits, instead it is a wide open window to a reality that too often the society do not want to observe.
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