Italian Journal

Most of day I was on Piazza Maggiore making photographs from scenes passed many Christmas' ago. I thought because it was Sunday there would be just a few people on the streets because most everything would be closed. Ya! Right! The last shopping Sunday before Natale and all the stores would be closed! Think again my consumer society, some things are the same all over the world. It actually worked out to my advantage to have all of the shops open and the streets full of humans with lire in their hands ready to spend it on some useless gift for their beloved. I went to the centro, right on the town square. There were mobs.

It was great! I realized something important about my project. I am working from the vision of someone else (I knew that). I am going back to, if you will, 're-visit' their vision and to make a contemporary version of it (I knew that also). I am interested in changes, both architectural and cultural. I actually consider myself to be a (visual) cultural anthropologist. OK then, once I am set up and all the tech stuff is done, I want to make an interesting photograph. That means something that will attract and keep the attention of the viewer. I kind of feel like Max Yavno must have in San Francisco in the early 60's, setting up the view camera and just waiting for something interesting to come into the frame. So my interaction with the old photographs is to find them and set up and wait for the action (visually and culturally) to become interesting.