Tamara Quadrelli
"L'HEURE DE LA SIESTE "
Favourite Photographer
Luigi Ghirri, Franco Fontana, Guido Guidi, Jeff Wall
What makes a good photograph?
For me, a good photograph is something that speaks directly; in my work, I seek beauty in the everyday, in the ordinary, and in the corners where no one looks.
There is a moment in the summer afternoon when Italian suburbs cease to be inhabited and turn into paintings. People disappear behind the shutters, the noise gives way to the cicadas, and color, that specific palette of 1970s residential architecture: pink, yellow, light blue takes control of the space. L'heure de la sieste explores this suspension through architectural photography: not the people who sleep, but the world waiting for them awake. I walked through Aprilia Marittima at the exact moment when no one walks through anything. Two, three o'clock on a July afternoon: the neighborhood was deserted but not abandoned, silent but not dead. The colors of the facades, so vivid, so deliberately cheerful, felt more alive than ever precisely because no one was looking at them. It is an absence that does not empty, but reveals: in the hour when bodies withdraw, the traces of their passage remain,a half-closed shutter, a shadow on the sidewalk, color that continues to exist without witnesses. This project is an attempt to capture that suspended hour: l'heure de la sieste as a state of the world, not just of the people.
