Blue

“The sea enchants, the sea kills, moves, frightens, sometimes even makes you laugh, occasionally disappears, every now and then disguises itself as a lake, or builds storms, devours ships, bestows riches, gives no answers, is wise, is gentle, is powerful, is unpredictable. But above all the sea calls. That is all it does, in the end: call. It never stops, it gets inside you, you carry it with you, it is you it wants. You can even pretend nothing is happening, but it is no use. It will keep calling you. This sea you see and all the others you will not see, but which will be there, always, lying in wait, patient, one step beyond your life. Tirelessly, you will hear them call. It happens in this purgatory of sand. It would happen in any paradise, and in any hell. Explaining nothing, without telling you where, there will always be a sea, that will call you.” (Oceano Mare by Alessandro Baricco). Why has man always taken the sea as a symbol of freedom? What makes water an element so close and yet so elusive to the soul? What makes it unchanging through the centuries and different at every instant, at every glance, at every ray of light? Why does the mere sight of the calm sea bring us peace? Why do we have the irrepressible urge to sail it, cross it, know it in every drop that composes it? The idea of BLUE was born precisely from these questions, and from a journey. It was born in the middle of the sea, the sea of Ponza, one of the most striking islands of the Tyrrhenian, the largest of the Pontine archipelago. From Rome it takes just an hour by car and a ferry, and the sea is there, awaiting you with its light, which is not the one you left behind, it is more intense, full, thick. It is different at every hour of the day; indeed, it is the light itself, and its combination with water, that marks the passing of time in a place where time seems not to exist. The sea is never still, and the light, through its movements, paints a landscape always dissonant from the previous one. You need only turn your gaze, put your head under the water, dive in, and everything, irretrievably, changes. I therefore decided to stop the sea and its light, to capture them at the instant they meet, the exact moment in which they merge to create something unique, magical, unrepeatable. I used my Nikon AW 130 to turn what was a family holiday into a way of reflecting on the sea, on light, and on the idea of freedom that lies behind it. Because water draws out the desire to think. And from this came the idea of abstract images, that could give everyone the emotions and the dynamism, in their forms and their colours. Even for those who, like me, are not great swimmers, nor do they practise underwater diving, but who at least once have looked with their gaze at water level to watch the sea change, or immersed, with their eyes - in this case the lens - pointed at the surface to capture the light that filters into the clear, crystalline sea, changing its colour. In these images is my whole relationship with the sea. I tried to convey the emotions one feels during a dive, the splashes, the spray, the bubbles, the cold impact with its surface, the enveloping silence, the intense blue and the silhouettes of the outside world distorted by the rippling of the water.