The Retirement Age
by Claudio Palma
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024', 2024
Category: People and Communities
In 1986, Francesco Palma became a traffic policeman. Thirty-six years later, he retired. One year after, he set off with his son on the Camino de Santiago. Through a collection of images retracing the journey, his final days of service, and the family archive, this work brings together the transitions of life and the questions that recur and must be rewritten over time. The dimension of the journey—forty years after his first and last time abroad—intersects with the rewriting of new possibilities, questioning their meaning, wondering what it means to find oneself, as at other stages of life, on the threshold of irresolution, with the need to find one’s own place of belonging and redefine his own role.
For nearly forty years, Francesco Palma found his individuality in duty: first during military service, then as a traffic policeman, making his uniform an extended representation of his social function.
The Camino offers not only an opportunity to reconnect, temporally, with his youth, but also a new system of symbols to reinterpret. Francesco went through the awareness of a town’s urban perimeter—of which he was a custodian—to the undefined, fluid space of a journey’s geography, where he could entrust new questions.
What has it meant to remain in one place for so long? How has his work influenced his perception of private space? How much of that youthful imagination has remained timidly hidden by not having seen elsewhere? What does effort and willpower mean for a retired man?
It is through the act of walking that this journey allowed both father and son to cross multiple spaces of their lives, comparing different phases of adulthood and youth.
“People are strange, different,” Francesco says at the threshold, looking at men and women with physiognomies he doesn't recognise, in a smile that is an epiphany. Thus, at sixty-three years old, Francesco Palma discovered that he likes to travel.
Review by URBANAUTICA
In Claudio Palma’s project The Retirement Age, the journey of his father Francesco along the Camino de Santiago becomes a visual meditation on life’s thresholds, on the identities that take shape and unravel over time, and on the mysterious balance between the need to stay and the desire to move. Through a sequence of images that weaves together the present of the pilgrimage, the final days of service as a traffic policeman, and fragments from the family archive, the author constructs a narrative that is not only biographical but almost anthropological: a private story that expands into a collective testimony.Francesco’s path is that of a man who, for nearly forty years, found his individuality in duty: first in military service, then in the uniform of the municipal police. Over this long period, guarding the urban perimeter became an extension of his own body. In human history, sedentariness and nomadism have always coexisted as opposing impulses: over the last millennia, settlement has prevailed as the foundation of organized societies; and yet the need to move, to set out again, persists and resurfaces like an ancient call—today more visible than ever in the growing desire to travel, to cross physical and inner distances.
Pilgrimage in Europe has for centuries been a shared expression of this need for movement. The Camino de Santiago, in particular, remains one of the continent’s most emblematic routes, a path in which millions of people have recognized themselves over time. It is within this tradition that Francesco’s story takes shape: not as an isolated episode, but as the echo of an ancient practice, revisited through the lens of a biography suddenly open to new possibilities.
In documenting this experience, Palma offers more than an intimate account; he restores a universal gesture. His images make visible the power of an archetype: the act of setting out when life’s trajectories seem almost complete. Here, photography is not merely an iconographic device but a symbolic testimony, showing how movement can redefine one’s sense of self, one’s memories, and one’s social and familial role.
Underlying the work is a subtle question: what does it mean to grow old? What remains of willpower, of momentum, when life seems to turn toward “retreat”? The English word retirement, used in the title, captures this stage more fully than the Italian pensione. For Francesco, the Camino is not only a physical path but a temporal threshold: it reconnects him with a youth in which the world was still vast and unknown, when traveling abroad was an extraordinary event. Walking now means asking what remains of that imagination, compressed by decades of duty lived in one place; it means discovering that at sixty-three, one can still desire something else—or perhaps desire, for the first time, once again.
Palma frames the journey as a space of exchange between father and son, between generations moving forward while observing and questioning each other. Along the shared path, questions arise about fatherhood, transmission, and the role that redefines itself precisely when it seems to have ended. Above all, the project reveals that the possibility of finding new paths is what keeps the will to continue alive—life as an ongoing transformation. When movement is no longer a choice but a limit imposed by the body or by circumstance, what remains are mere distractions.
At one point along the journey, Francesco looks at the faces of the pilgrims—men and women he does not recognize—and smiles, saying: “People are strange, different.” After a lifetime spent in the familiarity of the known, the otherness of travel becomes a form of renewal, possible at any stage of life.
Claudio Palma offers us a document capable of uniting biography and collective memory, roots and possibility, sedentariness and nomadism: a visual reflection on the very idea of moving forward.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024