Photographer Pietro Sacchini is an Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘The disease that doesn’t recognize you’. To see Pietro’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Ms Mina suffers from Alzheimer’s, and lost her daughter Stefania in the earthquake of 24 August 2016 in Arquata del Tronto (AP). The daughter threw herself over the sleeping mother during the earthquake, in an attempt to protect her, the roof collapsed and a beam caught her in full. Stefania died instantly, but her mother was saved.

From time to time, in brief moments of lucidity, he asks: “Where is Stefania?” To slip right back into her world without memories.

Artistic Criticism

What emerges from these images is a project that almost completely avoids the pious rhetoric with which Alzheimer’s is often portrayed. This is already a very strong element. Pietro Sacchini doesn’t construct a story “about the disease” in a clinical sense, but about the fractured identity and the precariousness of human recognition. The difference is substantial. The series works primarily on three levels: presence, dissolution, and relationship. Presence is very strong in the close-up portraits.

The faces are never treated as “sick bodies,” but as emotional territories. The most intense images are those in which the woman looks off-screen or directly into the lens: there, the project reaches an almost unbearable tension, as the gaze seems to continually oscillate between lucidity and bewilderment. There is no spectacularization of pain; instead, there is a suspended time. From a photographic perspective, the language is consistent.

*very shallow depth of field,

* soft, lateral light,

* backgrounds collapsing into darkness,

* warm but restrained palette,

* subject isolation through selective focus.

This technical choice is not merely aesthetic. The constant blur becomes a perceptual metaphor: the world around the protagonist loses consistency, while certain details—her hands, her eyes, her skin—emerge with an almost cruel precision. It is a photograph that uses the material of the body as an archive of memory.

Hands are central to the project. The photograph of the fist resting on the table is probably one of the key images in the series: it shows not an action, but resistance. The veins, the folds of skin, the ring, the tense gesture: everything speaks of residual identity. In a project about Alzheimer’s, hands become what remains when language fails.

The narrative construction of family relationships is also very interesting. In the images with the other women, a system of bodily dependencies is created: being fed, being supported, being touched, being looked at.

The disease thus appears not as individual isolation, but as a redefinition of emotional space. This is one of the most mature aspects of the work. There is also a very intelligent element: emotional ambiguity. Some images show smiles, moments of lightheartedness, even irony. This prevents the project from becoming monotonous. Alzheimer’s here is depicted not only as an absolute tragedy, but as a constant oscillation between presence and absence. It is precisely this instability that makes it credible.

The photograph of the telephone is conceptually very powerful. It introduces a double level of representation: the real person, the recorded person. In a project about memory loss, the technological device becomes a substitute archive of identity. It is one of the few images in which the project transcends the pure domestic documentary and enters a more contemporary reflection on mediated memory. The final image of the barred window is perhaps the most explicit symbolic statement of the series. The risk, in theory, would be to fall into an overly didactic metaphor (“the cage”). But here it works because it arrives after a long immersion in bodies and gazes. It doesn’t open the project: it closes it. And so it doesn’t impose a reading, but rather consolidates a sensation already constructed by the previous images.

From a critical perspective, the project has many strengths: great tonal consistency; the ability to remain close without invading; a very deliberate use of light; a strong emotional quality; an intimate yet unsentimental narrative construction.

However, there are also some interesting limitations to note.

At times, the project remains very much within the domestic and psychological dimension, without ever truly breaking away from the device of the classic portrait. Some images insist on a photographic grammar already consolidated in contemporary intimate reportage: blurry focus, dramatic natural light, emotional close-ups. It works very well, but rarely surprises formally.

Perhaps it lacks a truly destabilizing image, a photograph capable of interrupting the emotional continuity of the narrative. Everything is very controlled, very elegant. At certain moments, one senses the author’s profound love for his subjects—and this is human—but this very love sometimes attenuates the visual conflict.

The project thus seems stronger in its ethical dimension than in its experimental one. But it is precisely here that it acquires value: it does not seek to “invent” Alzheimer’s through aesthetic effects. Rather, it seeks to inhabit the fragility of everyday life. And in many images he actually succeeds.

The most powerful photograph, in my opinion, is the one in which the woman looks straight into the camera, her face almost completely immersed in the silence of the light. Because something rare happens there: we are no longer observing “a person with Alzheimer’s.” We are observing a consciousness still trying to remain present.

And this is probably the true heart of the project.

I was born in Rome in 1966 and graduated with a degree in telecommunications in 1984. My childhood memories have always been of a camera in my hand, essentially the memories of relatives and friends. My father ignited this passion by giving me a Kodak Istamatic and a Polaroid. I attended courses at "Officine Fotografiche" and "Sabatini School" in Rome, as well as various thematic workshops.

My approach to the world of art happened slowly over time; it was almost a quest, a different way of communicating, sharing what I saw or felt inside. I am a visual artist, more precisely, a photographer. I always joke about it: I lost an eye to glaucoma and replaced it with a lens to gain a different perspective. I love portraiture and landscape, united in the search for the intimate human experience, in bringing to light beauty—inner beauty, beauty in the message, in ethics and aesthetics—as Dostoevsky said in the apt quote from The Idiot: "Will the world save beauty?" Well, I'm trying.

In my projects, I use various techniques to achieve the desired goal: from creative blurring, to flash lighting in the studio, ambient lighting outdoors... I don't consider technique as a distinguishing feature, but rather the final result. What I look for in the creation of my projects is that the viewer is intrigued, asks questions, and understands the message behind the search for beauty in ethics and aesthetics.

At the genesis of every project there is always an inspiration, it often happens to me that I am not the one who chooses the works but they choose me, inspiration can sometimes be: a speech, a book, an image, a story, a film, a piece of music etc ... From this primordial "cocoon" then begins a work of inner research to best express a concept or a message, I begin to elaborate an idea that slowly makes its way also in the search for furnishing objects. I love using normal people as models, they are more difficult to guide this is true, but from my point of view it comes back to you more as expression, amazement, the magic of the innocence of the thing never done before.

Among the works that I have loved and love most certainly: "Red Passion" one of the first projects (2018), created with the creative movement in search of the strength of a dancer's emotions.

"Incorporatus" (2023/24) a project created with my son on the symbiotic union between human and territory. Lately I've been working on my own reconstruction and staging of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," a classic and timeless beauty.

When I think of my work, I like to think of a Genesis album: "Selling England by the Pound," an incredible artistic project from the cover to the songs, pure poetry. If the meaning of my work were a color, it would definitely be blue, which represents the freedom to express oneself and communicate, and then red, symbolizing passion, and as Galileo Galilei said: "Passion is the genesis of genius."

Ciao!