In the origins of photography and other visual arts, there is a desire to retain images. But the photographic act, unlike others, has a peculiar relationship with reality, and the photographer operates along a passage which precedes representation. The image to be obtained will present the result of the desired encounter between the photographer and the outer world, the part of reality in time dedicated to it. The images I present are part of a wide project about doors, and the wish to cross them through photography, something initiated about ten years ago, from which I chose those taken in Palermo. They are also part of an invitation to reflect upon the suburbs of the same city, in the summer of 2018. I think that setting the door’s theme in a place where looking has a specific meaning, may present an image of what I see as desire. In the Sicilian language, a way of saying to look, stems from the Late Latin “taliare”, which means to cut. The act of cutting indicates the interruption of a body’s continuity in two or more parts by using a cutting tool. In the act of pruning, the cut sharply separates the pieces, allowing one to continue its evolution, and the other, by stem or graft, to start a new one. In an equal way, the time portion captured by the shutter and the space cropped in the framing begins a new life in the photograph, one that allows the passage of a small portion of reality into another. Some images from the project “doors, things that are only themselves?” mark passages on the sequence. For me, framing is like thinking about the gesture of building a threshold, that may put our internal world in communication with the external, what we imagine with what we can see. These “doors” draw paths, open and close rooms with windows to the landscape, they help the gaze understanding, while the remaining trace in the photograph guards them as if taking it all somewhere else, but deep down only able to grasp the surface of such desire. The sequence’s final images show the rehearsals of a theatrical play staged in the summer of 2018 in the Danisinni neighborhood, nearby the historical center. “Danisinni’s elixir” is a contemporary rendering of “L’Elisir d’amore” by Gaetano Donizzetti, a collaboration between the Massimo Theater and the people who live in the neighborhood. Ten years prior, Wim Wenders presents the film “Palermo Shooting” and says that in this town one collides with love and death, daily life goes on only to obtain the desire for something, its surface, but never the object of desire.