12.16.2016 Gabriele Lopez

Gabriele Lopez - Episode 5

Hello to all friends and photographers out there!
Here comes the fifth of my articles dedicated to photography and daily life. It’s not easy to find something really outstanding to say every month, so I guess that the only chance I have to avoid deleting everything I am writing is to follow what I love. It may be not outstanding, but at least is true.

I have started photography to express myself, document my days, understand better the world around me and, doing so, be able to understand better myself. The mistakes I have done along the road are clearly revealed by a snapshot that I have taken years ago, before a situation changed forever, for something I have done. Joy and experience are preserved from an unfaithful memory.

Then there are pictures that can’t find home, they just wander around like lost souls between heaven and fire, confused like bar stories, surprised and free. Until they’ll find home I will keep wandering and searching. If you want, is an obsession with normality of nothing special but absolutely beautiful and touching in everyday life that happens and that I find uplifting.

I don’t search for that perfect moment, it just happens.
It is hard, sometime like in these last months, being a professional photographer and having to jump on other people’s stories. I love my job and I would absolutely do it again but sometime it just sucks time out of what you want to do. Late nights are for writing, printing, watching my photographs..sleeping time is postponed again and again. To win the sensation of being defeated, blind and bored I take pictures, the one I want or desire, I wait for them until something happens. After that, I feel better for a while then I start feeling empty and naked again and I have to find a new picture…but it can never be like last one…it’s a feeling you had before/a feeling you never had before. Real and imagination fly together.
Everytime, and the more it seems absurd that I do it, it seems all the more worthwhile to me, just because it doesn’t need to exist at all, which is perhaps the best reason of all for it existing.

The camera is a little black box with simple commands always in the same position, a camera that just does never get in the way between what’s happening and my vision…a genial tool for giving me a chance to find a meaning, to record, and be (sometime) more conscious about the importance of experience, being here, and connecting to what’s around. It’s a daily game of meditation, research, surprise and revelation.

So I guess it can be all dedicated to chaos.

Continue to read:
 Episode #1
 Episode #2 -My Photography-
 Episode #3 -X70
 Episode #4 -X70 part2
 Episode #5 -Final