Twenty weights, please is the portrait story of two very important women of my childhood and life: my maternal grandmother, her daughter. With this personal project and my pictures of many places rich of memories,Iwant to celebrate their journey in the London of the 1950s.
Their strength, their ability to survive and to make do, in a big struggle but with great dignity, always inspired my desire to “be”. I started to collect every little thing, a small object or trace of my Grandma’s English time. I remember when she was still alive at her place – between a cigarette and a cup of tea – how her tales from that past captured my imagination.
I was fascinated, I felt like I was there myself: on those streets, at the factory they worked in and under that humid sky, I could almost smell the air. I chose to resume and recollect the traces of their lives in a London that, although changed, still talks about that time. This project ideally begins with one of the first sentences my mother learned, “Twenty Weights, please”, while trying to buy some cigarettes (twenty) for her mother.
Since I can remember I always looked at my grandmother as someone to admire. That impeccable and smart way she dressed, even in the less significant daily situations, her natural flair and ability “to do everything” and her always-lit cigarette: that singular bad habit she nurtured with obstinacy until the very end. She knew how to take over with the iron grip of a commander with her harsh temper, intransigent but still surprising: she was capable of taking me away like magic, with her tales from the past, the real life in a foreign city at the service of important ladies as an housekeeper or a dressmaker, balancing with dignity between freedom and survival.
This is a memory diary: written and lived by them, read and re-written by me through a in and out of time journey which enters my present from the past, leaving me with a taste of melancholy that lives in who I am. The images I shot in those last 20 years safeguard this emotional archive: images with no temporal hint, just working places, the house, empty roads they ran with their bicycles, the market street full of still good leftovers, the light at the end of the day.
This project is the keeper of that past that I look at as an inspiration throughout my professional life; it’s an uninterrupted journey through the recounted memories and a life lived with such strength and lucidity. It re-takes shape every time my passion for photography draws emotion from those past empty spaces.
€ 50,00
