PREFACE
This work is about photography in its least utilitarian form (and that said, you could even stop reading here).
To accomplish it, almost 80.000 kilometres have been traveled by car, 23 countries crossed, 192 cities, towns and villages visited and I have no data as to the gallons of fuel, beer and coffee that have been consumed.
This is not a tourist guide, though, as I give no description of the countries considered, no travel tips, no nothing. You won't find any monument or landscape pictured here either (not as subjects chosen and represented as such, at least: you already know there's a tower in Paris, don't you?) also avoiding the staging of anecdotal or folkloristic aspects.
The "narration", by necessity safe from showy exoticisms, by choice devoid of nevertheless noble intentions of social criticism, is a "human landscape" entirely akin to the common experience of the viewer. In fact, the very designation of the place, though present, is irrelevant for the planned purpose, freeing myself from any documentary rigour, inventory completeness or photojournalistic pretext.
There's no claim to be offering novelties, of course, as there's indeed an already large, and perhaps already sufficient, "literature" about the matter. Yet, the inescapable necessity of a photographer is to cope with that often elusive zeitgeist, which by definition pays its ransom to mutability.
And that's when "one" place regains its role as the protagonist, in being the guaranteed constant, the "common place", the collective habitat of shared value systems and identity claims, so divided in spite of all the unities, so united despite all the distances, which is that undefinable continent where I had the privilege of being born and, perhaps, thanks to photography, also the opportunity to understand a little better than I could have without.
Above (left to right, top to bottom):
Hungary, Budapest; Portugal, Lisbon; Netherlands, Haarlem; Austria, Graz.
Right: Bosnia and Hezegovina, Mostar.
Below: Czechia, Olomouc.
