Interview • 111 PH

Andrea Ceriani, Rising Dakar

Dakar, Senegal

Please introduce yourself—what is your name, where are you from, what do you do?

I'm Andrea Ceriani, and I'm a lanscape and architecture photographer. I work individually, in collaboration with national and international architectural firms, companies and professionals, with publications in trade journals and web magazines.

What is your relationship with photography, and how did you get into it?

Photography has always fascinated me; it is a fragment of reality told through one's gaze. Even as a boy, photography fascinated me, but it was from my studies in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano that it became something more.

Starting from drawing, I found in photography the expressive medium congenial to me to represent architecture and landscape.

What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?

From my point of view, photography is a slow process of measuring space and relating to it. Before I do a shoot, I try to build a dialogue with the place. It's not planning but listening. It is like a person, it's about getting to know each other, starting a dialogue, revealing each other.

What is the story you want your pictures to tell?

In a world of images governed by speed, I personally like to somehow translate the silence and slow time that generated them into my images. Against the speed of communication, I find that stopping to look is increasingly valuable.

It is only in this way that everyone can find their own personal story in the images they observe. The photographer tells part of it, but it is the observer who writes the ending.

Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?

I would love to visit Jerusalem, an extremely complex, layered city, the scene of past and recent history.

What is your personal relationship to cities, and how do you perceive them as places in general?

Cities fascinate me a lot, especially early in the morning, before they wake up. Walking through their streets in the soft morning light, when you can still hear the silence, suggests to me a sense of stillness and an intimate relationship that I love to translate into images.

In my vision of the city, I am used to portraying urban landscapes often without people, like complex stage sets of the theatre of life, which cyclically goes on stage, like staples of an ever-changing script, through days, years, centuries.

Regarding your project Rising Dakar: What was your intention, and how did you come up with the idea?

The idea came to me while walking around the city for the first time during a work trip. During my stay, I was immediately struck by the fervour of a city with so many construction sites everywhere and their marked tendency to grow.

Which project did you never finish?

I don't have unfinished projects, but several new projects in development and others that I consider open series, just because of the evolution that cities experience and witness.

What is that one thing you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?

Talking about buildings proably the Nakagin Capsule Tower, a work that even as an architecture student had always fascinated me.

If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?

Wow, that's a peculiar question. If I could travel back in time I would definitely say to learn to love the places we live. Learning to take care of them, starting with the smallest things, means preserving our roots.

What do you prefer saying: «to take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?

I consider this to be related to the mechanical act of making the image through the camera, so perhaps I would say the latter in my case, although I prefer to talk about how these photographs arise from one's gaze, which comes before the «click.»

What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?

In general I find it very interesting to be surprised by light or seemingly adverse elements of the scene, because we cannot always govern all aspects of the shoot.

In 2017 I was in Ireland and the weather was predicted to be very good for the Ring of Kerry driving tour. Unfortunately, instead for two consecutive days fog and low clouds concealed the horizon and visibility was very poor at times.

Disappointed at first with the weather, however, I imagined the possibility of not describing the scene entirely, but of narrating an undefined landscape, leaving the observer's imagination free to imagine the horizon. Against all odds, my first landscape series, titled UNdefined, was thus born.

If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?

Definitely an architect. From my educational background I was able to combine my two greatest passions so it couldn't be any other way.

How would you describe one of your pictures to a blind person?

Good question. I would describe one of my images from the perceptions I had at the time, telling the atmosphere, the feeling, the story behind it.

What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?

I am currently working on a series called Walls. I wanted to start from the wall, a pivotal element of construction and transversal to the architecture of every place and time, to make a very graphic series, to be observed slowly not only in the center of the scene but along the edges, which suggest what happens beyond.

The element that par excellence divides and conceals from view somehow wants to paradoxically become a universal starting point to try to «look beyond» and imagine one's own story.

Thank you, Andrea!

Editorial Notes

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Photography: Andrea Ceriani (2020)
Location: Dakar, Senegal

Links: Website, Instagram

Dakar, Senegal

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