Taking pictures from island to island

I met him the first time in Lipari, in the Aeolian Islands, a bunch of volcanic islands in the Mediterranean Sea, to the north east of Sicily. He already visited and lived in different islands at that time and among all of them the Aeolian archipelago was the one driving the strongest attraction and becoming a second home for long time.

He approached photography for passion, and at the beginning it was the tool to express personal projects, mainly linked to the life on islands. Throughout the years, photography gained more and more space, extending in the tourism and hospitality world where he was already working. Hotels, food and events became so the new stages of his pictures, which acquire every year more character and identity.

I always appreciated his cuts, unusual, unconventional, sometimes inconvenient but almost always very intense: shots I would have discarded during the first selection, passing through his eye, gain a new perspective and with it a new strength, able to move the sight from a static dimension of what the image represents to a more dynamic research of what that image could express on a deeper level.

And this perspective unfolds its best potential in the pictures of people, where even more that research effort, in this case of human connection, is strong and able to make a shot more beautiful and intense than others.

After years watching him at work, it is thus clear to me that his constant desire to create relationships with the team of an hotel, the guests of an event, the chef and the cuisines staff, … plays a key role in the outcome of a shooting.

A story has a different strength if the writer lives it in person: it is the energy of his experience that in those words comes to life.In the same way, a photographer needs to live the places and connect with the people he photographs to give birth to a valuable shot.

The disciplined excitement of a kitchen restaurant during the service in a “Kitchen Vision” shooting, the farmer picking up the grapes during the harvest, the housekeeper watering the flowers on the windows of the hotel, a gourmet dish with a blooming garden as a background, …become the pieces of a story.

And so a nape, accompanied by an authentic research project, becomes a refined and subtle expression of an intimate dimension, maybe more hidden but for that reason more essential, that the photography is able to catch.

 

To visit his portfolio: https://www.stefanobutturini.it

 

Photo Credits: Stefano Butturini