Playing cards sit on the table, a child challenges a pinball machine, the tablecloths covering the tables have eccentric, colourful patterns. These are scenes we’ve surely lived through dozens of times, without ever thinking they could be photographic material.
It’s precisely from this word, nothing, that the work of Davide Pitetti begins, a photographer who describes his own approach through a series of questions that sound more like a manifesto. Can there be something stimulating in what we consider unimportant? Can the human eye truly grasp everything around it? And are we certain that interesting things are only the ones everyone else can see?

We use the word nothing to label everything we consider irrelevant, a walk, going back to work, grocery shopping, the Sunday outing taken just because “we need to unwind.” The next day everything starts again, the same routine repeats for another five or six days, and so on. Pitetti asks himself what would happen if we tried to turn that nothing into our everything.

His photographs seem to answer exactly this question. There’s something nostalgic about them, as if they belonged to an era that hasn’t fully passed but that we keep moving through without noticing, floral tablecloths, landline phones, board games, objects that still exist but that we’ve stopped looking at. By paying closer attention to what surrounds us, Davide Pitetti says, we might come across a priest carrying a statue of the Baby Jesus in his arms and wonder what led him to choose a plaster figure over the chance to become a father himself. We might contemplate a wonderful view, realise it’s artificial, and at the same time recognise that it truly exists. We might look at our children and understand that the time we’ll one day wish we could get back to spend more moments together is, in fact, exactly what we’re living right now.

Things happen everywhere, Pitetti says. If we fail to see them, it’s only because we look for them with our eyes, instead of with what we carry inside.