Claudio Falcone, from Catania, Italy, born in '75, does not like to call himself a photographer, but rather someone that takes pictures.
His passion dates back more than 20 years ago when he started shooting with an SLR, given to him by his father, setting with the lens fragments of memory mediated by his own personal vision of reality. For him, self-taught, technique is necessary but not sufficient. His technique comes from instinct, and the result is born from imagining the shot direct to the naked eye, making it a reality with a measured perspective from his hand.
For nearly twenty years his photographs testify to his personal vision of the world that can not be shared with anyone for the strong inner impact that the images captured by the lens represent, and that they transmit once printed.
A neo-neorealist style that anachronistically prefers black and white because that's the image he sees. A chromatic gray that elegantly exalts the games of shadow and natural light that bring the photo to life or allow it to be lived dreamily. No filters, no artificial light, no installation and very little use of chromatic effects.
His credo is precisely to capture reality, the real non-artificial one and without masks. These intimate and unsharable images that for years have been jealously guarded and never exposed.
Over the years, a portfolio grew that shows how he knew, consciously and in a sublimely contradictory manner, how to capture that moment in which light and shadow, solids and voids are arranged harmoniously in front of his eyes, and that moment, just that instant, where the people portrayed are intent on living it.
His images enchant us just for that extreme ease and the absence of any form of sentimentality. The image must be free from any physical involvement of the person who takes the shot. His aim is precisely to show how to be present, but not physically there.
In fact, there are very few shots in which people are looking at him and his lens. Women, men, children, views of landscapes, streets, cities and, even more, the sea are his main characters, caught in moments where the author manages to capture the encounter between the eye and what he likes to call the belly, halfway between the heart and mind.
Photos born to his inner need, but which convey strong emotions and cause us to reflect on the extraordinary essence of dull and static everyday life.
