Proudly Made in Australia (2018)

On the ferry to Kangaroo Island, a man’s long, grey beard catches my attention and inspires me to photograph him. «Your beard is very beautiful, congrats», I tell him. «Thank you», he replies. «It was a German friend of mine who advised me to make it grow». «Are you European?» I ask him. «No. I’m not German. This beard is proudly made in Australia».

This is the spirit behind my work Proudly Made in Australia, an easygoing series of photographs, a memory of a trip to the Australian continent, among its beauties, its icons and its deep cultural issues.
Whether it’s the sale of an apartment in Surry Hillls or a pair of Ugg shoes, everything in Australia is “proudly” done in Australia, an ostentation that seems to open up the need to claim its own social identity.

Proudly Made in Australia is an intimate and personal work, where the narration of a journey declines images that represent the ideas, the reflections, the fears and the obsessions of a photographer who explores and discovers a different reality and where photography becomes the formal projection of the urgencies of the thought.
The series is an exercise in style where the smartphone is used as a free optical device able to shape the discontinuous allegories of thought and to seize the representative models of photographic genres (from street photography to photojournalism, from portrait to photographic document).