Pietro Coppa

It happens sometimes that we go out without a precise destination, a bit bored, perhaps with a camera in hand, without much desire to walk around. But it works very well as an antidote to boredom.

Foliage in an urban landscape. Rome, Viale Giulio Cesare, December 20th 2024. The year is drawing to a close, and cannot be summarised in a few clear, concatenated and defined images; on the contrary, it eludes us, perhaps because unitary and coherent visions and interpretations have been lacking for so…

If the City suddenly offers such opportunities to capture a certain vein of surreal glee, how can one turn them down?

I wanted to collect some images to try to recount some of the atmospheres of this in-between time between summer and winter, which is now almost at an end.

There is a fine line between private, personal, hidden, and public, visible to all. And this demarcation line is transformed from an insurmountable boundary into a necklace of points of contact

’O Franza o Spagna purché se magna!‘ so proclaimed the disenchanted Roman plebs in the 16th century, faced with the clash for supremacy in Europe between Charles V of Habsburg and François I of Valois, but back then people were starving, there were famines, and combining lunch and dinner for…

Armchair and pavement. Rome, Borgo S.Angelo, October 28th 2024. There is a somewhat autumnal charm in things that have lost their function and utility, a serene sadness that emanates like a perfume from their state of abandonment, and the dignity of objects that, without serving a purpose any longer, have…

When the day darkens and fades into evening, there is a suspended time, a moment in which the sky is still bright but the shadows of the incipient night are already stretching over things and people.

The images I present here have little in common with each other: the things and people who are their subjects represent or do different things, with no apparent connection between them. To use a literary comparison, rather than chapters of a novel, they seem like scattered tales from a somewhat…

The sea has always exerted an irresistible fascination from which innumerable images of marinas have sprung in painting and photography

In photography, as in all arts, there are rules of composition that make images more pleasing and usable. They are rules that are part of our culture and that we almost always respect without even realising it. Every now and then, however, it happens that we take some ‘wrong’ photos,…

The images I offer here are a few travel photos from a quick, and certainly superficial, passage through Brittany this summer. They are fragmentary annotations of what I perceived to be an atmosphere: finis terrae, places where a land goes into the ocean, cloaked in a slight melancholy, where one…

The conscious tourist sometimes feels a little out of place, an intruder in situations and contexts that are not entirely familiar to him.

In photography, a certain sense of unreality, certain atmospheres with a surreal vein, can be achieved in an infinite number of ways: a particular light that refers like a quotation to other images, a choice of particular subjects, the composition that arbitrarily unites or clashes different themes, the heavy realistic…

Underground, the world below, both in the real sense of a dark and hypogeal place with stairs, descents and ascents, and in the metaphorical sense of a degraded and dangerous human condition or of civil coexistence. Ascent to a non-place. Rome, Via Tuscolana, May 5th 2024. But in my own…

A few days ago, passing through Piazza delle Vaschette, in Rome just behind my house, I noticed an old Volkswagen Beetle, evidently stationary for quite some time, around which luxuriant burdocks and other wild grasses were growing between one cobblestone and another. Time hedges in front of the beetle’s eye.…

Leviathan’s mirrors. Rome, Via delle Fosse di Castello, May 21th 2024. The City is full of traffic, of traffic jams, a chaos increased by the myriad of works in progress in anticipation of the 2025 Jubilee.In this infinite marasmus navigate, contributing to increase it like great leviathans, the tourist buses…

I confess that there are times when telling about my city and illustrating my relationship with it seems to become increasingly difficult. This will certainly depend on me, on my fatigue in searching for themes and images that are not the repetition of things already done, or on not finding…

These images at first glance would appear to be a series of still lifes, of details and objects, mainly chairs, motionless and almost without human presence.

Here we are at the third and last chapter of the collection on the walks to Piazza Navona, not in the sense that I will stop having it as a destination, but that after the third month of images I could only repeat myself.