I'm gonna "puzzle" you...
How my puzzle portraits were born.
I’d been traveling for years as a photojournalist for the agency PhotoAid (www.photoaid.eu) and I combined this job with taking portraits.
There was no problem as long as the layout required horizontal photos – for me the world is horizontal! – but it was more challenging if the photo editor wanted a vertical image.
It was on one of these occasions (in London to be precise) that I came up with an idea to get myself out of this pickle…
I decided to photograph the subject in three separate horizontal parts, from head to toe, then reunite the photos to make a single vertical portrait… It worked! The end result is an intriguing and original image which I christened a “spezzato” (Italian for “broken”).
This was the first of many – I’ve taken more than 700 to date. Here you can also see the layout published in Class Editori’s magazine, CAMPUS.
I "puzzle" everyone!
I like the imperfections, the repetitive details and the unnatural perspectives which come from the phase of reconstruction. The idea was a success and the photos inspired a number of collaborations with as many newspapers.
Initially, I combined three or four pieces but soon broadened my vision: instead of just photographing the person, I began to add their environment.
At the beginning, I mainly used an analog camera, the legendary Lomo, a Russian-made 35mm “cult camera”.
