Photographer Simone Pastorini is an Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Broken’. To see Simone’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Broken stems from an increasingly intense perception of impermanence. Being an only child, childless, with aging parents, inevitably places me before the fragility of time, the awareness of loss, and the fading of memory. It is a feeling that stays with me and one that, I believe, eventually belongs to each of us as we are called to confront our human condition.

The project takes shape from this very need: to give an image to that sense of emptiness that often overcomes me, turning a deeply personal experience into a universal reflection on absence, memory, and time.

Through symbolic photographs, suspended landscapes, time-worn objects, and reconstructed scenes, Broken explores what remains when the past begins to dissolve. The images do not recount facts; instead, they evoke absences, memories that grow uncertain, and the traces of an identity continuously redefined by loss.

Memory thus becomes a fragile, shifting territory, destined to transform. Yet, in the very attempt to hold onto it, the possibility of reconstruction emerges. Photographing becomes an act of resistance: a way to exorcise the sense of loss, give shape to absence, and search-among the cracks of memory-for a possibility of permanence.

Broken is conceived as an open project, intended to evolve along with the life and experiences that feed it. It does not aspire to a definitive form, but embraces time as an integral part of its language, continually enriching itself with new images, new symbols, and new reflections.

Ultimately, Broken is a work on grief before grief takes place. But it is also an act of trust: the search for a hope that survives dissolution, the conviction that even what is shattered or lost can continue to hold meaning.

Born in Pistoia, Italy, in 1975, I began working with photography in 2013, following a long-standing interest in the visual arts. I found in photography a natural language through which to explore my relationship with places, images and memory.

My practice focuses primarily on landscape and architecture, approached as spaces shaped by human presence, transformation and time. In recent years, my research has gradually shifted towards more introspective territories, exploring memory, absence and the persistence of images.

Through workshops and ongoing personal research, I have progressively developed my photographic language, while exhibiting my work in a number of group exhibitions and taking part in photography projects and events.

I have been a member of the Gruppo Fotoamatori Pistoiesi since 2013. In 2024, I conceived and co-curated the first edition of PISTOIA VISIONI, a photography festival in Pistoia.

In 2026, I published my first photobook, INTERNO LENIN, with 89Books. The book brings together personal and collective memory through an archive of family photographs, objects and images, exploring the relationship between a father, a son and the historical context they share.

All images and text © Simone Pastorini