Every inherited camera carries a way of seeing that isn’t quite your own. Melania Rima‘s, a photographer working between analog vision and family memory, belonged to her grandfather, and that’s where her first roll of film began in February 2025: not a random experiment, but a precise, deliberate return to Corigliano Calabro, the town in the province of Cosenza where she grew up.

The project opens with a gesture that works as a threshold, an image meant to establish a direct connection to the man the camera came from, before the series moves away from that fixed point and lets itself be carried by the freer motion of moving through places. From there, the roll follows the rhythm of a town lived rather than visited: hands working seasonal ingredients in home kitchens, narrow alleys where late afternoon light cuts across façades and settles on a sacred icon painted on a crumbling wall, bodies facing the Ionian Sea in poses that look lifted from a family holiday rather than staged for the lens.

This is photography that isn’t after the event but the texture of the everyday: sand on floor tiles, backlight burning the edges of a frame, the slightly off colors typical of film that ages well instead of fading. Corigliano Calabro isn’t told as a postcard or a social reportage, but as the emotional space that remains once you stop chasing the perfect frame and start photographing to remember.

The most interesting part of Melania Rima’s work lies precisely in its dual nature. Each shot holds up on its own, with its own composition and its own light, but together the series builds something larger, a visual diary that can be read fragment by fragment or all at once, like a long letter written in installments. It’s a choice that overturns the logic of the traditional photographic project, designed to be consumed in sequence: here every image can stand alone, and together they still form a coherent story, that of someone returning to the places of childhood with a tool that wasn’t hers and ends up making it entirely her own.