Curiosity. Perception. Being influenced by our environment.
Maybe it’s these things that lead many of us to pick up a camera. From that moment onwards, very different worlds open up before us, of various levels of evolution and narrative capacity.
They are all things that have helped me to really get inside certain ways of seeing things; initially purely on instinct, then later using technique, observation and an understanding of my own path in life.
I never deal with themes such as ‘tenacity’ and ‘perseverance’ because, as yet, my passion and research have overcome every occasional difficulty that has arisen over the years.
After an interesting and fairly lengthy period of photographing exclusively in black and white, first using film and later digital, I finally managed to get colour into my pictures. These added shades were a crucial part of that ingredient which, during this stage, gradually became the most important aspect of my photography: Aesthetics.
Never worrying too much about any planning, I allowed myself to be guided by the movements of the world around me, such as the grass blown by the wind, the leaden sky just before a storm, the sea’s currents at dusk. As with romantics in literature, so my photos unconsciously tend towards the irrational.
This intense period of falling in love with photography came about through the successful translation of expectations into images that really moved me. And, just as important, the realisation of having entered into an intimate relationship with my ‘sense of self’, or, in other words, Beauty.
A relationship unlimited by time (other than my lifetime) and that can manifested in an infinite number of ways, with no constraints on the where and when; its only requirement being that I nurture it, every day, during my daily chores, my work, my corners of time.
For these same reasons, I have rarely been separated for more than a couple of days from the various cameras I’ve had over the years; whether I was in the office or stuck in traffic, they were there with me, to capture the scenes on the street, the portraits of strangers (thank you a thousand times over to the great masters of the 1900s: Robert Capa, Henry Cartier Bresson, Ferdinando Scianna, Salgado, Eisenstaedt and many others), trying to contain my desire to click the shutter, taking a long time to observe every scene.
Perhaps it was in this period that I started to see the geometry, the alignments, the horizon and the actors within a scene. In my case, the actors are people; true variables, charged with very different messages conveyed by the simple use of the body (observational skills I may have acquired through theatre acting I did years ago).
This period of falling in love, or ‘romantic’ period, so wonderfully chaotic for my photography, allowed me gradually to concentrate on the human being as the real main player in reality; slowly moving away from the aesthetic confusion of the Italian city centres, so full of signs, wires, roadworks, so little respect for architecture and monuments; moving myself towards more natural surroundings. Although telling the story of man in an urban environment remains one of my ambitions, I still have a lot to observe. 🙂
Simone Bramante // Brahmino
Storytelling, first.
Digital Creative Director / Photographer
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