Daniele Dainelli's Hidden Florence & An American Tale
Daniele Dainelli interviewed by Edoardo Schinco
Since its birth, street photography marked a significant turning point. Photography started to get closer and closer to common reality and allowed us to grasp meaningful details characterizing people’s everyday life. Here, the Italian photographer Daniele Dainelli provides us with amazing pictures, making an exciting inquiry into the Florentinian and U.S. cultural essence.
Who are you? Would you introduce yourself to our readers?
My name is Daniele Dainelli and I am from Florence, Italy. I approached the world of photography in the winter of 2012, when I bought my first reflex camera just for fun, as almost everyone does. Since the first days, I have loved to shoot landscapes, but then my focus changed to street photography.
I discovered street photography due to my attraction to the idea of black and white pictures, and also because Florence offers some of the most beautiful settings (and faces) in the world. I got bored of the same landscape pictures, so I decided to test myself on the street by capturing everyday life at the markets, downtown, and in the little alleys of Florence. I started to put people in my urban black-and-white compositions. Then I discovered the photography of [Bruce] Gilden, [Mark] Cohen, [Richard] Sandler, and many others. I started to try the colors and to approach people by going very close to them. From that moment, I made some projects in that style and I am so happy about it. The change in my process has been gradual, and I think it is still ongoing.
There is no room for doubt that you are a photographer. Would you also call yourself an artist? Is photography an art in your opinion?
I do not know if I can consider myself an artist or not, I do not even know how we can use this term nowadays. I do not do this as a job, I decided to quit photography as a job because I was afraid that one of these days I would have lost my passion, along with the strength to carry on a project.
I have chosen a normal job in order to keep on taking pictures and to wander the streets.
Photography is an art, of course: to me is the expression of beauty, to give people both the personal meaning of beauty and an idea of a proper reality.
I can consider photography a universal language to explain something, to give a message, to create a story.
Where did you get your artistic inspiration? What are your favorite sources?
I started with street photography in 2015, even if my style was very different from the one I have now. I was following a photographer called Eric Kim, and he was a great source of experience for me.
He made a lot of street photography guides, how to approach people, how to shoot portraits of strangers, and also how to behave when someone gets angry because you make a picture of him.
Unfortunately, Eric Kim stopped that cool flow that he created, and I switched to other sources.
We live in an era where you can enjoy culture for free, so it’s very easy to find and follow a wide range of sources of inspiration. I fell in love with Richard Sandler’s work “The Eyes of the City”, another great source of inspiration for my work. Therefore, I decided to do something in my city, Florence.
In 2016 I started my project “Hidden Florence”, which is still on, and I don’t exactly know when I’m going to quit it. There is no hurry, I take pictures for myself, for the simple pleasure of my soul.
Do you have artistic projects or ideas you will develop in the next future? Could you give us a taste of it?
Yes, of course. I have an idea growing in my head: I would love to document my town’s country fairs. I live in the suburbs of Florence, and here, during the summer, you can find a lot of fairies about the theme of typical food from that zone. The Italian word for it is “sagra”, and I am not sure if there is a proper translation from the Italian language to English.
It is a world that I love so much, so I am starting to think about this project, even if it won’t be easy. There, you can find lots of awesome characters and traditions, it is very “tasty”, if I may add that term to the photography-related vocabulary. We will see next summer what I am going to do, I have to start developing a good story about it.
One of your artistic projects is named “Hidden Florence”. When did it start? Why did you focus on Florence?
Hidden Florence is my main project, it is the project of my city, and it started in the first months of 2016. I focused on Florence because it offers awesome settings and awesome characters (if you have a trained eye).
I can reach the center of Florence by train within 30 minutes, so it is very easy to go there: when I started the project back in 2016, I was not working, so I had so much time.
I do not shoot a lot: I am not a “robot” photographer shooting 300 pictures every day.
I can consider myself a lucky person if I can collect one or two good portraits in a whole day. Another thing that I want to talk about is the brutal changing of the situation because of COVID-19.
I had many problems during the pandemic period, because people were “scared” when someone got close, and also it was difficult to shoot because of the masks covering people’s faces.
I was losing the pleasure of taking pictures; I also made a pause for several months.
Now the situation has improved a lot, and luckily, everything is returning to normal.
My favorite period of the year for shooting is before Christmas, that is, the months of October, November. and December. I love to wander in this tornado made up of people running through bars, and boutiques …
What was the aim of “Hidden Florence”?
One of these days, I would like to write a book and organize an exhibit, but I do not know when. Indeed, the project is still going on and I do not have the intention to stop it soon. One needs a lot of time and space to document a city with pictures and portraits.
It would be great to finish this awesome trip with something big, I am going to think about it in the next months.
I hope that people and viewers of the project will understand my message: it is a sort of call to help regarding the city. If we keep on feeding this ever-growing tourist tornado, we will lose the authentic pure beauty of that city. Many inhabitants are leaving the center of the city to move to quiet suburbs, and that is a bad sign.
What is the artistic idea lying behind this project?
The city is becoming a banal theatre for tourists, and it is difficult to come in contact with the real Florentines. Hidden Florence is a provocative collection of uncommon faces, captured with the flash as grotesque pieces of ancient art surviving this speed-centered modernity.
Through a series of portraits, this project aims to focus on the survivors of the new era that keep alive the myth and tradition of authentic Florence.
A collection of photographs that analyzes the problem, comparing us, directly, with a “race” in danger of extinction: the generation of the past.
Your second project is named “An American Tale”. Why did you shift your attention from Italy to the U.S.?
An American Tale is a short-term project that I made during the summer of 2017, when I planned a coast-to-coast journey in the USA.
I have always been attracted by the USA; I started the project with the will to tell my idea of beauty through the faces I met in all the cities of my journey. The strong point of this job is that every person looking at one of my pics has to think about a tale. Anyway, I do not want to declare the true story behind my pictures, so I let people imagine.
An American Tale is a work where aesthetics plays a fundamental role. There, I wanted to tell my feelings, to move from city to city, and to find myself in front of new faces, whose features were hard to find in my country. The title of the project is a tribute to “An American Prayer”, a poetic composition written by my idol, Jim Morrison.