Alberi – Trees | Fine Art Photography

When the Subject Was No Longer Enough

For years, I photographed trees without ever thinking they might become a project.

At first, they were simply presences I encountered every day.

Some stood along the route between my home and work, and they kept drawing my attention.

I watched them change with the mist, the snow, the sunlight, the moon.

Whenever the light or atmosphere felt particular, I would stop to observe them, and often to photograph them.

During those years, I also spent a great deal of time in the woods. I loved walking through the hills and mountains, looking for mushrooms or simply observing. As I returned to the same places and became familiar with different environments, I slowly began to think of trees not simply as individual subjects, but as presences through which I could explore the passage of time.

I wanted to follow them through different landscapes, ideally accompanying them along the course of a river, showing their beauty but also their stillness, their differences, the ways in which they seemed to exist alongside one another. I was interested in the solitary tree and the forest, order and crowding, strength and fragility.

In 2017, I began gathering photographs I had made over the previous years into a single folder. My initial idea was still to create a predominantly nature-based body of work and, from those images, eventually develop a photographic book dedicated to trees.

I showed the project to Giampaolo Borghi, who at the time was the councillor for culture in the municipality where I lived and director of the MAF in Ferrara.

He responded enthusiastically to the work and wanted to present it at the museum.

From that selection came an exhibition in 2018 and a small book, Alberi, conceived in relation to the show. The exhibition was subsequently requested by three other municipalities.

The project had found a form and received a very positive response.

And yet, while working on the selection of photographs, I began to feel that something was missing.

Beyond Description

This series explores trees through fine art photography, focusing on light, form, texture and the changing character of the landscape.

Among the many images I had gathered, there were some that interested me for different reasons.

They were not necessarily the photographs that best described a tree or its environment. In some, movement altered the structure of the forest; in others,

light made the subject almost disappear; elsewhere, trees became masses, lines, isolated presences.

I was still starting from reality, but what began to attract me was no longer simply what stood in front of me.

Even the titles I had chosen revealed, without my being fully aware of it, that something was shifting: Alone, Absorbed, Dreams, Reflection, Shakers, Different, Crowded, Order.

They did not describe species, places or botanical characteristics. Instead, they attributed states and relationships to the trees, almost behaviours.

Looking back today, this seems to me one of the clearest signs of what was beginning to happen. The landscape was becoming a space through which I could observe something beyond its simple representation.

This transformation did not come from a conscious decision. There was no particular moment when I decided to leave nature photography behind in order to search for something else.

It was, rather, a gradual loss of interest in images that simply showed what was in front of me.

I continued to love trees and to photograph them, but I increasingly looked for situations in which photography could alter the way they were perceived.

The more I tried to build the nature photography book I had originally imagined, the less I wanted to take it in that direction. Instead, I began paying greater attention to the photographs that seemed to move away from description.

I had not lost interest in the subject.

What I was looking for through it was changing.

What Remained

Today I know that this research did not end with the 2018 exhibition.

One part continued to follow trees, but gradually became more essential. Some of the images from Alberi stayed with me for years and, much later, found new relationships with one another. From this long process of sedimentation came what I now call In Their Time.

But that was not the only direction.

As I moved closer to trees, I had also begun observing their surfaces. Bark became texture, marks, matter. The closer I moved, the more I lost the perception of the tree as a whole and began to see something else.

A surface could resemble skin.

A texture could become a landscape.

A detail could contain a space much larger than the thing I was photographing.

At the time, I did not think these observations might belong to a broader research. They were simply images I continued to feel drawn to

Over the years, however, that same attention to surfaces, matter and the possibility of transforming perception reappeared in very different bodies of work.

Sometimes a surface became a landscape; at other times, the subject gradually lost its boundaries until it began to merge with what surrounded it.

Looking at those photographs today, I do not want to attribute to the past an awareness I did not have at the time.

Many of the things I can recognise now were then simply intuitions — images that continued to attract me without my knowing exactly why.

And perhaps this is precisely why Alberi still holds a particular meaning for me.

It is not simply a project that came before the work I make today. It is one of the places where I can recognise some of the questions I would continue to follow over the years, even as they took on completely different forms.

Perhaps this is also why the nature photography book I had imagined never became the book I had originally intended.

It was not the tree that had stopped interesting me.

I had begun to discover how much more I could see through it.