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Note: the following photos can be strong for some people and I invite you not to watch this portfolio if you think it will be too much for you.
If any portfolio inside the section "_Personal" of my website is indeed a private way of exploring photography, this portfolio is the most intimate one I ever made in my whole life and decided to publish.
It is about my deep question on where material of our body goes after death. I find quite interesting that the root of the word "material" is "mater", which in Latin means mother.
I lost my mother one year ago and I publish this portfolio after one year from that day. I had been thinking a lot if making or not making this portfolio would have been a good idea. I decided to go for it because it was my way of overtaking my personal grief.
My mother was born on the 13th of February 1939, she got married with my father on the 13th of July 1963, she died on the 31st of July 2013. I found quite strange the coincidence of the appearance of the number thirteen through her whole life and this fact made my doubts even stronger.
This work does not have answers. I would rather hope it will point out good questions and everyone looking at it can find the most appropriate answers following the best belief.
Pictures on the left were taken by me (beside the first two ones which are not mine for obvious reasons) during random moments of her life but mostly during the last months of her existence when her cancer accelerated a lot and obliged her to be on a wheelchair. I am not a medical doctor and this is not a scientific work but during her last years I have been speaking with a lot of doctors and reading a lot of medical papers to understand what they were saying and why there was not a valid solution to save her. I also always thought that as humans we are not just an empty volume but what we see from outside goes along a structure and tissues. I took some of the photos on the left to kill my stress and to keep the most of my memory of what it would have been lost forever. This was (and I guess, still is) my deepest sorrow. No one photo is spectacular neither there is the intent of being impressive: I am sorry if it appears like that.
On the right I stitched photos about my personal research of what her body appeared from inside during her disease. I used the only camera available to me: a software which reads data collected by a computer-assisted tomography (CAT or TAC in Italian).
As a photographer, I am used to deal more with what my eyes can see and this is "material"; this time I actually wish our existence can overtake this dilemma and what we are used to see is just a minimal part of what actually exists.