For thirty years now, at all latitudes of our wonderful planet, I have been photographing oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, marshes, waterfalls, clouds, snow-covered areas, icebergs, glaciers. In other words, water in all of its states and the living beings protagonists of the environments it gives life to. Where there is water there is purity. The extremely pleasant sensation within it is perceivable, and it is one of the most noble ones we can actually appreciate. Therefore, I slowly ended up removing from my most significant works human beings, guilty of polluting purity in all of its forms, in the natural environments as well as in ideals, dreams, and values.
Perhaps, then, it is inevitable that in order to find a thread for our existence, I now find myself returning to photographing man in a swimming pool. This is the only liquid environment in which he is the undisputed protagonist, engaged in the last expression of absolute purity of which, according to my opinion, he is capable: the athletic act.
In Swimming pools, accomplished during the last 2009 FINA World Championships in Rome, I therefore passed from photographing the gesture of the nature to photographing the nature of the gesture. Before getting into the relevant considerations, however, I do want to point out the only photograph exhibited which reproduces a swimming pool void of people. It was impossible not to photograph it because, on the contrary of other sport stadiums, which when deserted only communicate events concerning the past, a swimming pool full of water is always a pulsing vital body. The weaves of the water or the lanes are ready at all times to transform themselves into lines on which one can write another page of exhilarating emotions, magnetic perceptions, seducing visions. They change to my eyesight according to the temporal viewpoint from which I observe them with my camera.
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