After years of pictures in a “comfort zone,” about people and places I felt comfortable with, almost all the pictures of Farang were taken in circumstances that were alien to me. What happened in front of my eyes in my emotional and visual interior molded together to create a personal interpretation and narration of things, places and people, transforming something that is extraneous to me into something personal. during this exploration my approach was mostly egoistic. I was not interested in telling anything about my relationship to my subjects, their identity or their emotions; I just used them as pieces of a photographic puzzle, whose final results were a projection of my fears and of my desires, of my nightmares and my dreams.
During these three years I’ve looked for something extraordinary in situations that, in most cases, are quite ordinary. The camera has become an instrument to break people’s blindness to reality’s wonders and make them feel my own fascination.
I see some analogies between this project and Tarot cards; the process of discovery, the process of unveiling someone’s fortunes or misfortunes in tarots reading is not far from my idea of photography. In this body of work almost every picture has an evident subject, a single element, a person or an object that acquires a larger meaning, that becomes a symbol of something bigger and collective, a new archetype: a suitcase, a mask ,a child hanging on. I try to suggest a meaning to my pictures but, as with tarot cards, different readers will give different meanings to what they see.
Francesco Merlini
Francesco Merlini, Farang
January 28 – march 25, 2017
Le 247
247 rue Marcadet
75018 Paris
France