The Waves of Time — Fine Art Photography Time

The Waves of Time is a fine art photography project exploring time, memory, transformation, and the changing landscape

For years, I photographed the badlands near my home. And for years, those photographs did not satisfy me.

I live in an area where these formations are very common and remarkably different from one another. Some have yellow tones, others red, while others take on colours ranging from pale blue to deep blue. I would often stop to observe and photograph them, each time trying to bring out the best in that landscape.

The images could work. Light, overlapping planes and forms could produce aesthetically compelling photographs.

But I continued to feel that something was missing.

I did not simply want to make beautiful photographs of a landscape that had already been photographed many times. There was something about the badlands that interested me much more, something I could not yet translate into an image.

Looking at their eroded surfaces from a distance, I saw something that reminded me of human skin under a microscope, or the wrinkled skin of an elephant. Some forms seemed to cover joints; others resembled veins running across a body.

When I photographed them from the ground, however, that sensation disappeared. The horizon kept bringing everything back to the representation of a landscape.

I needed to change my point of view.

Looking from Above

When I began flying a drone over the badlands, I understood almost immediately that this could be the way forward.

By gradually removing the horizon from the image, the landscape lost its familiar references. I was no longer looking at a hill, a valley or a wall of earth.

I was looking at a surface.

I began searching for badlands in different parts of Italy, but the ones that continued to interest me most were those close to home.

It was there that I realised that this surface was never truly the same.

Humidity, rain, sunlight and shadow could profoundly alter its appearance.

I remember one particular sunny afternoon after several days of rain. I left home and within ten minutes I was there. I sent the drone up and saw that parts of the badland had literally turned pale blue, while in the shadows the colour deepened into a much darker blue.

At that moment, I had the feeling that the earth itself was changing its skin.

That was when I began to think that the work could become a study of the skin of the earth.

For about two years, I kept returning to those surfaces, accumulating photographs and videos. I was no longer looking for the most spectacular badland.

I was looking for marks, variations, lines, ramifications and transformations of matter.

Eventually, I made around twenty test prints.

From Skin to Time

I already knew Lodovico Pignatti Morano: we had both taken part in Extinction in Bologna in 2020.

One day, he invited me to Galleria B4 to see the work of Riccardo Badalà.

I decided to bring those prints with me. By then, I had begun to think of proposing the project for my first solo exhibition in a gallery.

Lodovico responded enthusiastically to the work, and on that occasion Riccardo also had the opportunity to see it.

The title I had in mind was The Skin of the Earth.

While talking about the photographs, I also explained what I had discovered about those formations: the action of water, the continuous process of erosion and the ancient origins of those sediments, connected to a marine landscape that had existed millions of years before.

From that conversation, Riccardo suggested another title:

The Waves of Time.

I liked it immediately.

In those words I found the water, the forms within the images and, above all, a dimension that until then I had perceived without being able to fully name it: time.

Riccardo later wrote his own interpretation of the work. He deliberately chose not to approach it from a geological perspective, but through what he described as a sentimental reading.

In his text, the image of skin returned once again: the same intuition from which my research had begun.

Two Times

As the exhibition began to take shape, however, I felt that something was still missing.

Those surfaces contained a real history that went far beyond what my photographs could tell.

I therefore asked Alessandro Bonora, a long-time friend and highly experienced geologist, to accompany the project with a scientific interpretation of the badlands.

It seemed important to me that those looking at the images could move between two dimensions: the perceptual one suggested by the photographs and the geological one of matter formed and transformed over periods of time vastly longer than our own experience.

Two different ways of entering the same landscape.

Bringing Matter onto Paper

Five months after that first meeting, Lodovico made Galleria B4 available to me for three weeks.

I conceived the installation as a journey through the work. Three large photographs greeted visitors at the entrance, another large image occupied the inner part of the gallery, and around ten works accompanied them along the corridor.

But I wanted the transformation I had pursued within the photographs to continue into their physical form.

I therefore chose a textured paper and worked on the definition of the images to emphasise their material quality.

The works could not be touched, of course, but I wanted viewers to be able to almost imagine the texture of those surfaces simply by looking at them.

During the exhibition, several people asked me whether what they were looking at were actually photographs or drawings.

That question interested me.

Not because I wanted photography to pretend to be something else, but because it meant that the subject had begun to lose its obvious identity. A fragment of real terrain could become line, matter, skin.

The First Solo Exibition

I still remember the opening day as a particularly intense moment.

It was my first solo exhibition of that level in a gallery, and there was a wonderful response. Many guests invited by B4 attended, along with friends, artists and people I had never met before.

Among them was Greta Schödl.

I had the opportunity to speak with her about the work. She responded positively to the exhibition, but more importantly, she offered me some advice on how I could make the exhibition experience even more immersive.

That same evening, I had the opportunity to visit her studio and see some of her works.

I also remember the conversations with the other artists who attended, their observations and suggestions, and the questions from visitors.

For me, it was not simply the satisfaction of finally seeing on the walls a body of work that had taken years to develop.

I began to understand that an exhibition could be something more than the sum of the photographs on display: the space, the scale of the works, the materiality of the prints and the way visitors move through the images could all become part of the experience of the work itself.

What I Was Looking For

Looking back at The Waves of Time today, what interests me most is not the moment when I found the right way to photograph the badlands.

It is what had forced me to search for it.

I had before me a landscape capable of producing beautiful images, but those images were not enough.

To express what I was seeing, I had to change my position, remove the horizon, wait for water and light to transform the surface, and finally search within the print itself for a material quality capable of continuing that transformation.

The badland had remained the same.

It was my way of looking at it that had to change.