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

According to Aristotle, matter is the substratum of every change, of every movement of form. It is a principle of things, constitutive of corporeality. Thus conceived, matter is pure indeterminacy, knowable only indirectly, arguing its existence as necessary for the composition of reality. In this way matter is understood as power, pure capacity, which is nothing, but which can become something.

If we accept the idea that the purpose of photography is to return a coherent and understandable image of reality and we do not consider the fact that reality itself is not entirely objective, we cannot understand that the perception of everything that surrounds us is nothing more than the fruit of our mental process that processes visual information. Therefore, what we call reality is only a set of individual, changing and unstable perceptions. It is in this area that my research on informal photography moves, where the realism of the mechanical medium is replaced by the perception of shape and colors, sometimes unique and unrepeatable as in the encounter between fluids of different colors and densities, other times with the de-contextualization of an ordinary object, or part of it, to the point of dissolving any reference to consolidated reality and regenerating it in a new expressive solution. In any case, the “real” data is replaced by the “possible” one and in this way, reality is perceived through the senses, where it is the mind of the observer that attributes meaning to what he sees.

The Materia Series is a research on the concept of abstraction in photography or rather, given the mechanical and descriptive character of the photographic medium, it is a research on the informal perception of a decontextualized reality within a finite space. The choice of different states of aggregation of matter allows us to explore the infinite expressive possibilities of forms, which in this way appear fleeting and ephemeral, and can be “frozen” in a unique and unrepeatable instant, only to disappear forever within the matter itself.

A passionate photographer since childhood, he studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. After graduating, he worked for a few years as a fashion photographer, first in Milan and then in Paris. He then turned to outdoor journalism, working for several national and international magazines and for a Sky TV thematic channel. At the beginning of the new millennium, he began to work as a fine art photographer and with the photographic series "Flowers" in the early 2010s, he gained international recognition from various art magazines and some private collectors. He went on to produce a number of photographic series on urban landscapes, but the search for an informal photographic context continued in his other work: all his recent photographic series focus on photographic abstractionism, sometimes achieved through the decontextualization of an everyday object, sometimes through the use of different states of matter.

Studio in Olbia, Italy, 2024

All images and text © Alessandro Idini