Peripheral Places – Short Stories by Catia Montagna
I love observing the flow of life in peripheral, sometimes anonymous places, outside large urban centres, places of passage or discrete existences. And I photograph, conscious that I am freezing instants of the present as they are already turning into the past.
Looking back at photographs, I often wonder what became of those people with whom I briefly coexisted in a certain place and a given moment in time. People who only left a trace of light through the lens of my camera, an impression in my memory. Who were they, where were they going? Questions that evoke stories.
This is how I began to conceive a photographic series of Italian peripheries composed of ‘short stories’ - stories that, as in literature, are more ‘open-ended’ than longer, more articulate narratives. Tales as short as the chance encounters that underpin them, each consisting of three photographs, with human presences often barely hinted at, and united by the fact that the narrator in each is the ‘place’ in which they take place: places that speak of the passing of time and the ephemerality of existence reflected in the imprints it leaves on objects and landscapes.
