L’Ulivello

In my post graduate years, I worked to save money to shoot and travel. I hustled three jobs to get my bank account respectable enough to take low-paying jobs overseas. I frosted cakes in a bakery, among other things, to save money for film and darkroom supplies. This set of priorities, typical of any artist, yielded this body of work.

L’Ulivello is a villa in Tuscany where I was based, an ancestral home in the Chianti region. This is where I shot my work that year. It sounds idyllic, and it was. It was also a job. For you see, I was a tutor for a family of Bond villain academics. One, an Etruscan archaeologist. The other, a Mediterranean classicist. There was a cavalcade of other types like them in and out of the house all summer for fellowship and flexing. The mother loved to remind me of “my place in the household”. Her tune of which changed when she sleuthed I had family in nearby Cap Ferrat. But the father was kind. He graciously dished out fatherly advice and encouraged me to shoot every day. He operated in his own bubble. This frustrated his spouse. They fought a lot.

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Daily lunches, always eaten at home and always at the same time, were peppered with deep conversations about the needs for my charge on that day. Food was served by the contadina as we discussed all the things that needed to be done that day. Who was stopping by, where we needed to drive. Playdates, appointments, farmacia runs. All of it was planned in Italian. And I shot it all.

There was an extended mid-summer break I took in France when I visited those same relations in Cap Ferrat. I remember how refreshed I felt being around family. But it was too short, and I had to go back to my job with the Bond villains. I was lonely. The work reflects that, a bit of shyness. I’d peek out at my own pace while shooting, then I’d turtle back in. My pictures reflect the transient permanence of family; this lines up with the reality that the villa has since been sold. I believe it’s an albergo these days.

Fast, deliberate shooting polished to a shine over the course of that trip, and subsequent trips. For I returned, this time with grant money, to shoot day-to-day Tuscan life. I had no agenda apart from recording in film what surrounded me. The people, the hills, the ideas. Oh, and, the light. That magnificent Tuscan light. Like frosting.

Featured on Edge of Humanity’s critical photography blog under “Rural Life”.