Nicola Buonomo

Nicola Buonomo is a 34 year old Italian photographer. He lives in Sicily. He has a degree in medicine and a specialization in child and adolescent neuropsychiatry. For some years he has deepened photographic art through a path that has allowed him to refine his technique but, above all, to understand the historical and cultural roots of the photographic image. Today photography is for him a tool to understand the “things” of the world and a pretext to give meaning to the apparent chaos of everyday life. He prefers images imbued with a certain degree of ambiguity, those that leave room for more interpretive possibilities. Moving away from the figurative cliché, his research tends to conquer the unveiling of the “true” through an image that requires the presence of a slow gaze, far from the noise of the stereotype of the figure, but close to the silence of “peripheral things”.

Serendipity

This project, which I consider “an archive in progress”, was born from the exploration of Sicilian peripheral spaces, located on the border between the countryside and the land undergoing development. These hybrid places, caught between the desire to return to the wild and the inevitable push for architectural-technological progress, represent for me fertile ground in which to attempt an understanding. In these “non-places”, still not characterised by a defined identity, it becomes easier to trace the archetypes that are promoting changes in the landscape and, consequently, of the destiny of civilised man. “Serendipity” is the critical and emotional status with which I conducted my investigation: trying to keep pre-judgment at bay I let the images present themselves to my gaze, almost anonymously, keeping me at a critical distance from them that would allow me to “see them again”. When this happened, their ambiguous power gave me back a strong sense of possibility: what previously appeared in contrast, disharmonious and implausible, slowly took shape in a “gestalt” that gave back meaning to space and things. Working on the “land” was a pre-text to explore man: his presence is evoked by the solitude of the scenes in which objects, buildings, cracks become “footprints” of his passage and his desires. Working on the edge of land still without a clear identity was ultimately an authentic “experience” of places where things, still in an early stage, potentially contain every possibility but, above all, they appear to the eye simply for what they are.

To view more of Nicola Buonomo’s work please visit their website.