Emanuele
She was a fish seller in, I think, central South Vietnam. There was a market. She had the typical hat with a red strap. She had red lipstick, she had beautiful eyes, and she was in the shade. She looked at the camera. I took the picture. I can actually see the reflection of the sky, and my silhouette in her eyes, it was a beautiful picture. I showed it to her, and she was almost emotional. I regret that I didn’t take very detailed notes of all those stories.
At the beginning, it was a three month trip, a working holiday, to improve my English and gain some motivation to finish university. I never found the motivation. I ended up staying 12 months in Australia, and I spent three months traveling in Southeast Asia on the way back. I fell in love with traveling, and with photography as a consequence.
I decided to go to Canada. I stayed there for a year, and then I moved to New Zealand. Between 2011 and 2015, I was traveling as much as I could, between months of hard work. I called it the Long Term Traveler Project. When I left New Zealand, I traveled for two years straight until Italy. As soon as I got to Singapore, I did the majority of my trip of one year by land, Mongolia, China and Tibet was all by train and bus. When you travel long term and remove the problem of time, you can actually follow your senses.
Photography was the main reason, landscapes, people. I became a big fan of portraits because I was spending crazy hours in markets. From a small village in the middle of Laos, to a big market in Ulan Bator in Mongolia, just taking pictures of people. I don’t understand why people are so scared of diversity when, if you think about diversity, it’s very appealing to all of us.
In 2009 I wanted to take pictures of something that was unique and beautiful. The thing I love about iris photography is how personal it is and how difficult it is to get that picture. It’s beautiful how deep the human iris is. It’s more complex than a fingerprint, and I can see like rivers and then the ocean and islands and mountains and planets. I love the three dimensionality that I can achieve, it’s alive, and it’s beautiful.
I consider myself a very happy person most of the time, and that has to do with the fact that I was able to, with a lot of hard work but also a lot of luck, to transform the biggest passion of my life into my profession. It’s a very good feeling.