I am the quiet one in an Italian family that does its best to valiantly uphold the stereotype of the famiglia in which everyone has the right to express themselves loudly and boldly. I usually have not chosen to rival the wonderfully dynamic voices around our dinner table, be it my older sister’s irony-free pronouncements about her readings of the Stoics or my father’s evening summary of the drama of European Economy condition. Up until two years ago, my preferred modes of expression were numbers and movement — meaning, I love math, and make sense of my world through problem-solving that involves calculations and counting. Numbers have always spoken to me, but so have the movement of my muscles when I find myself immersed in the constant flowing of nature’s ephemerality. I like to say that my body in the water, on the rocks, and on the snow has its own intelligence. When I find myself duck diving, climbing an arête, or carving down from the ridge of a mountain, I feel that my body has its own intelligence. In these moments, via the connection between brain and body, I am able to recognize within nature the same equilibrium I feel when doing mathematics. The fascination I nurture towards photography and the rapture I am captured by when performing it lies precisely in its capacity of expressing my person as an equivalent of nature. For quite some time now, I feel like these two poles of expression, condensed in the very essence of photography, encapsulate much of who I am.
When I arrived at St. Paul’s I took a photography class where I was given the chance to explore the world around me through the lens of a camera. Much to my surprise, I discovered the image as a language of expression that would allow me to map out my world with much more subtlety and complexity than I ever thought possible. Transcending the digital camera, I found joy in using film and learning how to develop it through countless hours in the darkroom. I was used to seeing the world in broad strokes — reaching out across the Atlantic between America and Italy to make sense of my world, but the camera gave me a tool to refine the map of that space between worlds, and in so doing, to find a better sense of where I belonged.
Walking through the woods on the St. Paul campus, camera in hand, I would happen upon a shadow-filled bog, or a leafless tree reaching up into the winter sky, and suddenly the eye of the camera would fuse with mine, and a second would be captured, to be developed and examined slowly in the dim light of my darkroom. Moments stretched out this way, placing themselves one next to the other as I collected my images. I carried my camera wherever I went now, and could find reflections in the Grand Canal of Venice that reminded me of the murky bog in Concord. Little by little the map was filled out by images that charted my travels and made me part of a whole.
Today I can find the words to explain this map-making, but the images led me to the words. Images that now join numbers in the constant calculations I make of how and where to move in the world.