COVID-19 AND (STREET) PHOTOGRAPHY

First and foremost I hope you and all your dears are fine and well: I am, and my dears are ok too.

Although this site is in a perpetual “in progress” condition, 2020 was meant to be a very important year for the LIVEINEUROPE project, during which I had planned to fill some holes, so to speak, adding some 50 more pictures to the gallery.

I had plans to visit some cities I had already visited in the past, when I had different or no photographic purposes in mind (namely London, Paris and Berlin), plus a rather longish summer car trip which included Marseille, Barcelona, Madrid and Bilbao. 

Suddenly the whole world changed, and not in a good fashion.

Now, although I could properly define myself as a “documentarist” photographer, I’m not actually interested in “documenting” anything: as I already stated elsewhere in this site, I’m not interested in something that “is happening” but rather in something that “would have never happened hadn’t someone taken its picture”. So, as a photographer, I'm not into the Covid-19 thing as a whole.

I’m sure better photographers than me are already taking striking pictures of this “new normal” thing, but that's not my cup of coffe;
"new normal" is a definition I frankly refuse to consider: in my book, it's just a bad euphemism for “not normal”, isn't it?

Hence, the “Live in Europe” project is quarantined: I would not be happy to take pictures of people wearing face masks, distancing each other and staring at you as if you had a bacteriological bomb in you hands rather than a camera.

As I write, the gallery contains 250 selected pictures taken from 23 different Europeans countries, the oldest dating back to September 1991 (Scotland), the latest taken on August 2019 in Turkey (see below, just in case you had forgotten what it looked like earlier).

As soon as the good “old normal” thing will be back, I’ll remove this page and start again from where I left.

In the meantime I’ll try and find a (lonely) sycamore tree, sit in its shadow and start thinking about the fallaciousness of human plans and the human condition in general.

Best luck everybody.