Simona Salerno‘s shots seem like distant memories, like those photographs that remain locked in a box for years and, once found again, make us feel moved.
Born in Sicily in 1984, Simona now lives in Bologna. Her artistic research has always alternated with studies in psychology, two thematic areas that merge in her mostly analogical shots and in her Polaroids.
With their melancholic and almost surreal atmospheres, Simona’s photographs allow us to see the world with her eyes.
A selection of Simona Salerno’s shots will be on show in Turin for Ph.ocus – About Photography in the “Please, Stay Home” section. We have taken the opportunity to ask her some questions and get to know her work better. Don’t miss our interview below!
How did you discover photography?
The first contacts with photography go back to childhood thanks to the curiosity for places and the love to keep my dad’s memories alive and the interest for the photographic instrument as a half object through which to take pictures transmitted to me by my uncle. So, a little bit for imitation and, above all, for an evident personal passion, I soon started to bring with me a camera with which I could, or at least I could try, to impress and see the world realized with my own eyes.
What do you want to tell with your shots?
With my photos, I want to tell stories in which the observer can often find himself led into dreamlike and impressionistic atmospheres with an often melancholic note. The female body, the object of research, is represented through lived emotions that make it a “living thing”. If in some shots it seems to clash with the subject, in others I propose a look that wants to distance itself from the scene to insert it in the poetic-romantic contexts in which I would like to lead the observer.
Often between digital and analog. What influences your choice? Which aspects of the two techniques do you appreciate the most?
Being a daughter of the 80s, the approach to photography has been analog. In the digital SLR era, I bought one and for a long time, I experimented with it allowing myself to make mistakes and do my various tests in order to get closer and closer to what I wanted to tell.
After a break from every kind of camera and a little bit of amo et odi, in the last few years I have taken the analogue camera in my hands and recently I have mainly approached a world that has been and still is a discovery, the Polaroid one.
The choice between one instrument or the other is influenced by what I want to represent and by the mood I find myself in, certainly instant photography and then Lomography allow me to express and impress the visions that come closest to my inner world and make the observer perceive a reality that wants to border on the dream, with often undefined boundaries.
For me, experimentation remains the basis of everything.
Which photographers and/or artists influence your artistic research?
I am very fascinated by Luigi Ghirri’s silent vision of places and by the symmetries and pastel colors, as well as by the stories, of director Wes Anderson. I feel a connection with the aesthetic imagery represented in the painting of Impressionism, especially I find myself in the atmospheres of Renoir, Monet and Degas. Last but not least, music has a really powerful influence in my work as it helps me to support, enter and deepen the entry into some humoral states that I want to make perceive, but here would open a really long chapter!
Is there a shot you are particularly attached to? Tell us about it.
I am very attached to the photographic work I produced during the lockdown period. “L’attesa” is a photograph that I particularly love, I took it the first time I left home and for me it represents the possibility, intentional or forced, to allow oneself a time to wait, to wait, to hope, to tend to something, even at the cost of freezing life and the present. Because I think that there are moments in life when you have to know how to stay in your own silence and not necessarily do or act. Waiting is therefore a possibility and not an obstacle.
