Pietro Coppa

Breaking into an amorous discourse. Rome, Viale Fratel Porfirio Ciprari, April 23th 2025. Sometimes some disturbing element, some unexpected detail that ironically or dramatically modifies the sense of the image sneaks into a photograph, like a harassing and irrepressible thought. Whether this happens by chance, so the photographer must be…

Men and women, when we see them outside their private sphere, are almost always intent on doing something, either for work or for fun. These are activities that are carried out with seriousness and concentration, regardless of the fact that to an unfamiliar eye, perhaps even armed with a hint…

In this world we are all passing through. Fleeting passages in front of the photographer’s lens then, like timeless ghosts.

”Look at Gabriele Basilico’s strange City!” suggest the ancient statue. Rome, Museum of Palazzo Altemps, December 19th 2024. Ever since work began to beautify the City for the Jubilee 2025, someone, I suppose from the municipality of Rome, came up with the ingenious idea of sprinkling the fences of the…

Since time immemorial, human beings have been talking, it is one of the salient characteristics of the human species: they chat to each other, they converse with real people, things or symbols, they talk to distant people through the ubiquitous mobile phones, they even make inanimate objects talk to each…

Beneath the surface that the City presents to us, banal, serious and unimaginative, lives another, more ribald and jaunty city that occasionally sends out some smoke signals: perhaps the irony of some fortuitous juxtaposition, or some absurdity that pervades, like a barely perceived perfume, the things and people that inhabit…

The City sleeps, indifferent and anaesthetised passes by the less fortunate as if they were useless objects beached on benches and pavements. And it happens to me, like almost everyone else, to ignore them, not seeing them asleep in the street in the enchanted and dangerous sleep they share with…

The Odd Couple: Laurel and Hardy. Rome, Lungotevere Castello, January 9th 2025. A part of the wildlife has always adapted to the new habitats created by us, a prime example being mice, our unwelcome companions for millennia, as well as numerous other mammals such as raccoons, foxes, hedgehogs, squirrels, lately…

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…