What's boiling in the pot

I have been silently following Luca for a long time of certain of his images, the way he stopped a moment in a day among many. I saw his pictures evolve and his style change: colour and then a lot of black and white with strong tones, then colour again.

This morning I found her well described in one of his posts a situation I have come across several times, which I still come across periodically:

Every few years I experience a dry spell. I am referring to photography, of course.

The first time it happened I was really worried. I was coming off a very prolific months of street photography and after shooting on the street from week to week and posting images almost every day, I found myself facing a wall and for weeks, then months, I wasn't able to get a single image out.

That's how I work too: I snap and suddenly, no matter how full my life is, nothing, blank page and head full of "mumble, mumble...". When this happens, as photography is not a job and and I don't need it to make ends meet, I do more or less what Luca says: I detach. I let it all go and I don't worry about it.

From the point of view of what happens inside, learning is not a continuous process, let alone a linear one. Rather, it resembles a ladder: as experience accumulates, as I go deeper into a subject, I have the feeling that nothing is happening. Then, suddenly, often for no apparent reason and without warning, something changes: i become aware of the path I have taken, I see things from a different point of view - in the case of photography also in the literal sense of the term - and i realise that I am already at the beginning of the next step.

Of this ladder the worst moment is the end of the step: nothing seems to happen even for long periods and often the path taken up to that point seems to be devalued.

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The boiling pot comes directly dall'Albero Fiorito, which no longer exists, but was for years the constant of certain Sunday mornings when I would pass by and watch uncle cook with great curiosity and a tot of admiration. I used to accumulate scents and flavours that, to cross them now, twenty years later, in different and usually unexpected places, raise a commotion that is half enough.