I always had a particular feeling for those lonely old men who stand looking at the sea, thoughtfully gazing nowhere. I suggest, I suppose, that this has to do with the idea of an affair that some people have with the sea and with the idea of resignation of loneliness, a classic psychological condition, something like ‘The End’. From the very beginning these men have been present in my photographs. I don’t know exactly what that means, but for some reason I avoid looking for answers. When I started to take photographs, the only things I knew had to do with the cinema and I already had a lot of influences from American films, from Italian ‘Neo Realism’, from the English ‘Free Cinema’ and later on (some themes more difficult and elaborated on) from the French cinema. In most films from these influential sources the real protagonists were always men. So it is obvious that I always carry the images of people who have owed their emotions to the lives they led, such as in the films of Monicelli, De Sica, Fellini and so forth, or the lonely personalities of men in Film Noir and the Western. Ingredients that show destiny, the lonely journey, and social documentation were always what I was interested in, and which directed my choices.
The original image of the man looking at the sea started slowly to become repetitious and tiresome. That’s why I went on to take photographs of other, different moments in peoples’ lives.