Giovanni Lami, Italy
The Day I Started Collecting Doors Was When I Lost My Feet

My land – the place where I live – is widely known as a summer-time leisure paradise, but it also has one of the biggest transgender community in Europe. I’ve focused my attention on them, following an emotional sequence comprising of portraits and details of the country. I lost myself between their lives and these streets.

I try to transcend standard photographic labels – in my pictures, there is something private and intimate which everyone can relate to their own background. However, there are always familiar and destabalising elements at the same time. On one side, there are spaces, places and deserted buildings as if from a ghost town or from a movie set. On the hand, there are faces, looks and human presence. It’s the vision of a pair of binoculars – it lets the viewers make their own personal sequences without a fixed shape, based on their own life experiences.

I like to speak with the people I take pictures of, talking to them about their thoughts and about the place they live in. Even if it is only for a short time, I have shared with them. Taking pictures is really the last step, albeit the most important one.

I’m not a front line photographer. I try to follow the traditions of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans or Paul Strand, through American New Topographers (Rochester 1975), to today’s Alec Soth, Richard Renaldi or Mark Power. I have a great interest in people and lands, and the connections between them. My photography is more introspective, and I try to delete the space between the environment around me and myself.