The photographs collected in this project were taken as part of the “Archivio in dialogo” initiative in March 2024, promoted by the Fondazione Studio Marangoni (Florence) in collaboration with the Massimo Vitali archive. The aim of this call was to engage with the photographer’s work in order to develop personal pictures, capable of holding a visual dialogue with those of the archive. In my project, I started off from the space which is the most familiar and the closest to me, that is, the place where I live, in order to find points of contact and divergence in my surroundings with the work of the author I had been invited to engage with.
On 15 August 1994, Massimo Vitali took the first photograph in the series on beaches, which was not only the very first picture in the whole archive, but one which was to characterise his work for the next thirty years. This picture was taken in Marina di Pietrasanta (LU) which is four kilometers from where I am based. I walked those four kilometers to the beach with the idea that the best way to create a dialogue with that photograph was to personally come face to face with it. Along the way, I observed the landscape, taking pictures of what I found: architecture and urban design, public and private terrains, greenery, whether planned or natural, and areas of waste. My choice was not to take pictures of people; subjects, instead, already part and parcel of Vitali’s visual research. This project, dialogue as a confrontation, aimed at proposing a contextualization of the Marina di Pietrasanta beach, by revealing the surroundings and unseen spaces in the 1994 photograph.