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.

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.