Photographer Catia Montagna is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Spleen ’. To see Catia’s body of work, click on any photograph.

“We hesitated an instant

and soon recognised

our shared malaise.

There is no perfect name

for this strange torture,

some call it spleen

others melancholy.

But if we accept this game

we find at the margins

a knowable sign

making sense of everything”

Eugenio Montale, Incontro

The photographs in this short series reflect my interest in what makes us human. We are all different, shaped by different cultures, but there is a certain existential angst we all share and a fundamental need, and often inability, to communicate with one another.

The series is loosely inspired by the poems of the Italian Nobel Laureate Eugenio Montale. Montale experienced war and dictatorship and with his poems he offered an enduring meditation on the sense of life. His ‘pessimism’, the necessity of a disillusioned awareness and acceptance of the human condition, is tempered by the hope that humanity’s freedom of choice can lead to the prevailing of reason and solidarity and by the beneficial energy of nature.

We now live through difficult and highly uncertain times, of war, displacement, narrow self-interest. At this juncture, these photographs – taken at different times in different parts of the world – respond in a very small way to my need to cry out and remind us all of what is universal in the human condition.

Artist statement
I am a self-taught photographer and academic economist by profession. I was born in Italy and I split my time between Italy and the UK, where I work.

My passion for photography goes back a long time. I started taking photographs as a teenager and for many years photography was something I did for myself. In recent years, I started to share my work on social media and other publications.

Photography is important to me as an ‘experience’, starting from the act of holding the camera, looking through the viewfinder, framing and clicking. These simple actions help me see the world and, I think, understand it a bit better. My background as a social scientist has inevitably had an influence on my photography. I am interested in how we interact with our physical, social and cultural environment and how it shapes and is shaped by our lives. Despite this, however, by and large I do not develop projects following a documentary approach.  Rather, I am drawn by the subtle poetry of small, insignificant moments of everyday life and how they reflect the ‘existential’, and the ephemeral, in the human condition.

All images and text © Catia Montagna