Rodolfo's Methods

I / What, How, Why

What

LOSS is a photography project which is made up - so far - of three series of photos that I took over the last three years. The first serie is constituted by several black and white pictures that I took while having a walk by the Zurich lake (Switzerland) and pretends to explore the relationship that I, through my camera, established with what I was feeling back then and the surroundings, while trying to process and get over the death of my grandmother, that had passed away the day before. Curiously there was a connection between the feelings of sadness, melancholy and nostalgia that I was experiencing, and the way the day had dawned in that winter morning: cold, grey and foggy.

How

The project emerged spontaneously in that morning of December 2021. I got up, put something on, took my camera and left my home, towards the lake. Once I was there I kept walking, while I was listening to music and taking pictures. This process made me connect not just with my inner reality, with my feelings, but also with the way the world looked like in that day. Photography was a way of, through the clicks that framed my vision of reality, connecting with the different dimensions that made up my existence. After this, I remember only looking at the photographs a few days later and feeling quite happy with the outcome, not only because they were visually quite appealing, but above all because they meant something to me, they were part of a (never-ending) process of grief. Later, when working on my portfolio, I decided to edit and organize them, in order to create a kind of narrative that described the journey of that day.

Why

I wanted to grief and to process the loss that I was going through, once that due to several circumstances I couldn’t make it to the funeral of my grandmother. I was living abroad, a pandemic was going on and back then going out and taking some pictures sounded like the “right” thing to do to process this loss, perhaps because photography has always been a kind of extension of me, of how I see and relate with the world, or simply an escape. It constituted a catharsis and, at the same time, it changed the way I relate with lenses, once that it made realize the role that photography can play in telling stories that can disruptive and/or relevant to the societies in which we live in.

II / Interview (with Chan)