Photographer and Art Historian Eleonora Pecorella is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘WOMEN’S ENERGY’. To see Eleonora’s body of work, click on any image.
My mother was a feminist, and I grew up in Italy in the seventies surrounded by women fighting for their right to work, to speak out, to divorce, to abort. My mother and her friends were revolutionary people and very sensitive women, strong and extremely fragile at the same time. That’s what inspired me to start the project Women’s Energy. I feel that women’ strength lies in their rich and stratified emotional life. From a photographic point of view, I got inspiration by Paul Strand’s series of street portraits. I love his great mastery in celebrating the simplest, the forgotten, his ability to create an epopea of heroic characters although their very poor conditions. These 2 elements nurtured my wish to create series of emotional portraits of women, made up of feelings and details of their life, choosing their home as location, the place stereotyped as their realm, surrounded by their objects, by the space they created around themselves. I ask my model questions which prompted to relieve specific memories and emotions. The questions were invoked in specific locations and they wore as the emotion inspired her.
1 – Standing in the closet: When you were a teenager, what emotion did you feel at the end or beginning of a new school year? Do you remember the trepidation connected with the new beginning, and the familiarity in knowing it was an annual occurrence?
2 – At the front door: How did you feel the very first that you went out going to work?
3 – In front of the bathroom mirror: What do you feel as you contemplate yourself, contained in your own body, at once the subject and the object of your glimpse?
4 – In the living room (with/ without her partner standing next to her, facing back): Is the present for absence of a romantic partner an opportunity to grow or a personal restriction?
5- In the kitchen: What part of yourself do you relate to when you go out of your domestic context? With other are you interested or uninterested? Aggressive or submissive, open or introverted?
Daniela
Living most of your life in a relationship means to me going through different experiences: symbiosis, contrast, detachment, acceptance, acknowledgment, gratitude…
The thread is the research of this authentic and genuine part of ourselves that even if it’s deep inside, it’s so hard to find, to show, and eventually to share.
End of the school, holidays, beach, meeting old friends, and the emotion to meet new ones!
Alessandra
The presence of my family at home is always a reason of happiness and gratitude, a way to nurture harmony.
I loved studying and I still love it a lot. It was the time I applied with perseverance and it gave me firmness.
Fabiola
Thank you so much, your presence is strong and defined, you are always an opportunity to grow up, but sometime I feel it as a limitation… I accept it with the consciousness that it’s a limitation only in my mind!
When I relate myself with the world outside I want to give always the best of myself: kindness, participation, comprehension, but I’m not always in harmony with my emotions!
Immacolata
That very first day I felt conscious and proud, trust and sense of responsibility: it was a victory for me because I got it despite everything and everyone.
When I really see myself I’m amazed and suddenly, as for a magic, I feel my beauty while comforting me in a self-hug.
Margherita
Going to school it was always a terrible bother, fortunately I had my friends. Each year at the end of the school I was euphoric!
Mirroring myself I always feel a kind of animosity because I see an old woman and I realize how much time went away. Then I ask myself: what have you been doing so far?
All images & text © Eleonora Pecorella
See also:
By Eleonora Pecorella
