Woman Altered Landscapes

Photographs of Woman Altered Landscapes

© Dario de Domenicis / Agência Olhares

I wanted to talk about prostitution but I didn't want to do it in a direct, documentary way. What I was looking for was more a mental representation
of prostitute's human condition. With this attitude I wandered through the countryside around Rome, that area just outside the city, beyond the suburbs that prostitutes have always peacefully colonized. In Rome's case this area is also a land full of mythology, a place where millenary roads go by, a land celebrated by the words of illustrious travelers, such as Chateaubriand in his romantic "Letter on the Roman countryside", and last but not leaser reminiscent of a certain neorealist visual aesthetic. It was inevitable that along with my real perception of reality my work would be nourished by a visual heritage rooted in my own imagination. It was difficult for me to get rid of the expressive and evocative force of certain images of Pasolini's landscapes, which have been traced and described by this intellectual whose poetic and existential world is rooted in Rome. But it has been exactly thanks to this iconographic universe and not refusing the mechanism, called "mental cinema" by Italo Calvino, where you continuously project images into your internal viewpoint, that I found a photographic approach that would satisfy me. The answer came from a book by Ernesto Sabato, a great argentine intellectual and writer, who quotes Pasolini justifying his interest in social outcasts, such as the protagonist of "Mother Rome", who would explain how in misery life would continue to be sacred. This could be my key to what my images should say. What, better than nature itself, could give these sex workers their sacredness back? Which photographic genre, if not landscape, could better transmit both dignity and erase all involvement with judgment or guilt? These human figures, women or transvestites as they were, would acquire a heroic dimension to my eyes. Epic, modern farmers immersed in the majesty of a landscape of which they are now completely part of. I needed a stylistic choice that would give meaning and homogeneity to the narrative structure of the work and once again a possible solution came from the words of Ernesto Sabato. In his essay "La Resistencia" the writer states: "... for life to be reborn the space in a crevice is enough" So I decided to think of my protagonists as crevices through which life still has space to rise. I preferred a model where their presence was tuned in with the scenario, where there would never be any aliment breaking the formal balance between subject and background. This has been an attempt to describe the prostitutes metaphorically as the cracks in that archaic and rural landscape, of which they become the vital ingredient, the sign of continuity with the past, the element that immortalizes human history.