From the introduction of the book STAND STILL
by
Silvia Cavallini
…
When Costanza told me she was renting a room in Waltham in February to take some photos, I thought she was nuts. Waltham is a small, nondescript town near Boston. It lacks the grand buildings of New York, or Boston, or of the nearby Harvard University. In February, the temperature stays below freezing and the sun stays away. The streets are deserted as people dash in the dim light to their cars hoping to arrive home before roads freeze and they skid into a ditch. To makes things more interesting, Costanza arrived just before a storm that dumped 30 cm of snow. Schools were closed, police asked everyone to stay home, and planes and trains went nowhere. Massachusetts slept. Costanza had no cell phone, and would trudge through knee-deep snow to a coffee shop to call me. I was home with a high fever, and missed several of her calls. So she trudged a lot.
Though as a journalist and sometime news photographer I understand that good photos are more about your eyes than your surroundings, I hoped that, as a photographer whose formative years were in Florence, immersed in great art and architecture, her trip would not be in vain. It wasn’t. The beauty that Costanza captures is not a conventional beauty. Rather, her lens shows us what we would see if we slowed down a little, if we lifted our eyes from our to-do lists of time-sucking daily tasks and remembered that we should be open to unexpected beauty everyday.
Costanza beautifully captures the tension between wide and almost abstract shots and minute details, with the lights still on; unfinished projects and roads that lead to nowhere. Her’s images trigger some unexpected memories, of the dream-like train scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s film ‘Spirited Away,’ or of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Il Deserto Rosso’ (Red Desert).
Costanza Mansueti
– Photographer –
http://www.costanzamansueti.com
Email: mansueticostanza@gmail.com
+34 602 539 778
MaiMia 