Paolo Barretta is an Italian photographer with an extremely intimate and dreamlike research: his images, skilfully and cinematically composed, transpose moods and sensations related to loneliness and restlessness through the photographic language. Winner of the prestigious Portrait Of Humanity award organized by the British Journal Of Photography in 2021, he has exhibited his works in Australia, Italy, France, India and Ireland.
We chose to let Paolo talk us about this shot, full of evocative suggestions, but also elaborated in post-production.

Your photos often translate moods into images. In this case, what mood did you want to represent and why exactly in this form?

I took this image during the covid quarantine. Being locked up alone at home for more than 10 days gave me the opportunity to feel truly isolated from everything else, giving me the incentive to create something that could represent this bubble.
But not only that, covid is just a more general structure to imprint something that already exists. I am particularly fond of the concept of inner places, and with this image I wanted to represent an internal place I seek answers from, a place where I try to have a comparison as myself, a place where reason and feeling are specular but in contrast. The shape was a consequence, not having imagined the shot in this way.
The need to make everything surreal was revealed to me, just as the place I welcome inside me is surreal.

The lights in your photos are very important in creating the right atmosphere. In this case, you combine a warm light with a cold one: what is the purpose? Where did you take this shot?

I made this shot on an old mattress I rotated in post-production trying to make it look like a wall, a support, a dimensional plane.
The lights in my photography are very important, I would say they are even essential for the success of the work. I can’t tell you why I combine cold colors with warm colors, or vice versa. It is certainly such an internalized and well-rooted process within me that it is difficult for me to define it in a few words. Colors are my main form of emotional communication, and perhaps I use them in a certain way to draw attention to what interests me, to isolate what I want and remove it from the whole.

The two subjects, separated by a surface, do not observe each other and are positioned in an almost fetal position: how did you make this shot? are they two different subjects or the same subject portrayed in two different photos? how did you do the post production?

As previously mentioned, I made this shot by placing myself naked and in a vaguely fetal position on an old mattress. Initially it was supposed to have a more linear and cinematic reading, but since I let myself be inspired by the moment  in the post-production phase, I always open the door to the unexpected. It is often a reason for discovery.
The subject, i.e. me, was snapped only once. His mirror reflection is simply the same subject reversed in its position. I recreated the context around, rotated the image and made sure that both bodies were suspended vertically, emphasizing the dreamlike and surreal atmosphere I wanted to recreate.