Relationships to the waters.
Arnaldo Abba is 32, coming from Brescia, Italy.
He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he seriously approached photography and fell in love with it. In 2010 he graduated in Cinema at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Italy, and decided it was time to dig deeper into his new passion that was taking over every minute of his free time.
In the past three years I lived in Santa Barbara, California. As an emigrant, my friends often asked me what was the thing I missed the most about Italy. The first answers were always “My family, my friends, the food”. But the more this question was brought out, the more I was finding myself thinking about the waters of the Mediterranean sea of the small village I grew up in.
These photographs I took this past summer represent my relationship to these waters: they are an investigation to the source of fascination and attraction, but also fear and tremble I harbor for them.
The sea is in fact the place where the natural rules we know don’t apply: in water we float suspended in a liquid, and to go underneath the surface we need to hold our breath. The Mediterranean can be blue and reassuring or green, murky and frightful. It can be calm and flat or rough and stormy.
In all his way of being, liking it or not, I’ve been there.
The series “An Underwater Essay” is the investigation of what this sea represents for me. From the dark side I reject, to the calm one I love.
