Photographing an event without staging it

Events are often photographed through a predictable sequence of images: the official moment, the group photo, the smile toward the camera, the detail chosen in advance. But an event is not made only of the moments when everyone is looking in the same direction.

Documentary event photography comes from the possibility of leaving room for what really happens: people meeting, a conversation, a sudden laugh, someone watching from afar, an unexpected gesture, the details that tell the context.

In my event photography in Asti and the surrounding province I do not try to direct what happens in order to get a “perfect” photograph. I move through the event trying to understand its rhythm and relationships, to give back, through images, a story as faithful as possible to its atmosphere.

Whether it is a party, a private event, a professional meeting, a cultural project or an important moment for a community, it is not only the protagonists who tell the story of an event. The spaces, the details, the waiting, what happens between one official moment and the next do it too.

That is why I prefer to speak of documentary photography: not photographs built around an idea of how an event should look, but images that keep the traces of what really happened.

Because often, with time, it is precisely the photographs we had not thought of taking that tell us most accurately how we felt, who was there and what was going on.