Rome, AD 2025: “Can we give up photos or selfies?”

We live in times when words are losing ground to images. There are hardly any stories about trips or experiences anymore, no reflections or transmissions through spoken or written words. All that remains are souvenir photos or selfies, which merely testify that on a certain date, you were in a certain place.

This orgy of highly private and almost always insignificant images, which invade any social space like a blob, reminds me of the terrible habit of marring monuments with one’s signature and date, evidence of abysmal stupidity and a hypertrophic ego like that of the Landsknecht who, all the way back in 1527, defaced a fresco by Sodoma in Villa Farnesina with his name.

But at least those were heroic and dramatic times. Now the hordes that invade the city, adequately equipped with smartphones instead of knives and halberds with which to leave their mark on things and people, metaphorically plunder the iconographic heritage, filling the ether with superfluous images: from a thousand versions of themselves to the glass they are drinking from, from the pasta they are eating to the monument that they frame in the most banal way.

All this makes them look deformed and slightly grotesque, like someone forced to officiate an orgiastic religious ritual consisting of raising cell phones or cameras to the sky and dancing around the subject.

As an old photography enthusiast—hopefully a little less self-centered than the current representatives of the category—I have always loved photographing photographers, recognizing in their unusual postures, with a bit of self-irony, my own attitudes; in the photos I present here, I hope I have managed to add a pinch more of mischief.