Part 1: what programs do you need?

- A photo editor like Photoshop or an alternative program (like the freeware Gimp, e.g.)  that allows the use of layers and trasparencies.
- Google’s freeware photo browser/editor Picasa.
- Photographs (or pictures) of the same size and orientation (vertical pictures go with vertical pictures, horizontal with horizontal).

I use both Picasa and Photoshop for my multiple exposure pictures. The two software have positive sides and a not-so-positive sides and using them together help me to get the best of both words.

Picasa
This free program has a specific tool to blend together multiple exposures. It’s fast and the software takes care of the exposure for every single photo, which is great. It’s also very intuitive and it doesn’t need a specific knowledge (in opposition to Photoshop) to be used. The cons are that you don’t have real control over the look of the final pictures because Picasa automatically gives the same degrees of transparency to every photo. Also, the resulting picture can be saved as jpg only with a PPI of 72.

Photoshop
Photoshop is a commercial product that gives you the total freedom to choose any final format and any PPI number you like. It also allows the use of the eraser tool, many layer blending tools and much more. The only negative side is that’s not possible to see in advance (and in one glance) the final result like in Picasa: you actually have to work on the pictures for a while before to have an idea how the multiple exposure is coming along. It also require some knowledge of computer graphic.

Use both!

That’s why I use both programs: Picasa gives me a quite accurate idea how the pictures looks together right away and allows me to change one or more photos with a simple couple of clicks. At that point, if I like, I can easily open the same pictures in photoshop and create from scratch a more refined multiple esposure.

Part 2: the Picasa workflow

Open Picasa, select 2 or 3 photos in the browser (holding ctrl and then clicking with the left mouse button on every picture you like) then click on the “collage” icon at the top.

In the collage page, choose the option “multiple exposure” in the left menu. After few seconds, Picasa will show you the multiple exposure completed. At this point you can edit the image using Picasa’s own filters and save the final image.

Part 3: the Photoshop workflow

Open the final picture (the one made using Picasa) in Photoshop. Place it on a side to use it as a reference and open the same 2 or 3 pictures you used before.

Copy every picture and past them one over the other in the same sheet so that every photo has a different layer. In this way you can freely test different degrees of transparency or different blending modes. You can also take advantage of the eraser tool (or the really useful layer masks) to cancel parts of the photos. At the end, when you’re satisfied, you can save the picture in the format you like and with the PPI you prefer.

I wanted the face and the wing of the statue to be more visible so I worked on different layers to let them emerge. I also cancelled part of the pink flowers to make the face more visible. The picture is quite dark but this is a temporary problem that can be fixed working on “adjustment level” and brightness and contrast settings.

And these are the final pictures: the one on the left was created using Picasa, the one on the right with Photoshop. They’re quite different but both interesting in their own way.

A final note

If you have no intention to use the pictures for editorial purpose (where a 300 PPI is mandatory) Picasa is a program more than suitable, very fun to use and extremely easy. If you want to create pictures for a professional use and you need to have more control over the final result, than the pair Picasa + Photoshop (or Gimp) is probably the best solution.

Some useful links:

Official Picasa guidebook »

Official Photoshop guidebook »

What do you do if you go to the Holland Park to take some pictures and find the Kyoto pond covered with a slimy-oily-bad looking foam? Most of the people (probably the normal ones) would just turn their back and leave, looking for some other more attractive subject. Not me, of course! Since I’m used to watch all I see with a kind of crazy and perhaps obsessive attention, I couldn’t avoid to notice the peculiar shapes that the foam formed on the surface of the water. So I’ve start shooting and the result was… well, I’d say interesting.

Later on I worked on the pictures as usual with the classic darkroom filters (contrast and exposure) so the pictures you can see in the Winterdance flash album aren’t to much manipulated.

But sometimes happens that after the “serious work” I like to play with my photos. What came out in that occasion, was a colorful collection of pictures that I think deserves to be viewed. You’ll find it clicking on the “Winterdance at Garden Central” flash album.

» view Winterdance

» view Winterdance at Garden Central

This is a small project about London. I deliberate chose the most iconic subject of all, the red bus, and worked with multiple exposures and slow shutter speed. Simple as that.

» view London Red

Ok: let say that is a rainy, gray afternoon and you’re bored to death because there’s no way to go out with the camera. Well, what you do in this case? I don’t know about you, but I like to do my laundry. Which is quite an experience, if you come like me from a house with no washing-machine and you were used to wash everything with your own pretty hands…

Did you ever watched a washing-machine while is working,  I mean, really watched? Could sound ridiculous but I think is very relaxing. The way the clothes turn round and round, pulled and pushed by the centrifugal force, washed by the white, foaming soap and then rinsed through a furious, endless circle game, all of this really puts me in a inexplicable good mood!

Of course I’m joking… Almost… Anyway the photos you’re about to see are indeed an amusement. What a pair of sox can think while is prisoner in a washing-machine? Well, now you’ll find out…

» view Washingames

This absurd, crazy project is an evolution of the “Washingames” work. I had so much fun wasting my time sitting on the floor taking picture while my washing machine was working that I decided to do again, and this time with a clear plan in my mind: to take everything colorful or strange I could put my hands on and pop it into the drum to see what pictures could come out! Now they are not masterpieces of course, they’re just odd and funny, but I have to admit that I find this photos very uplifting. Especially the ones with the… frogs! No, not real frogs, I’m not that crazy, I would never do such a horrible thing! The frogs are just rubber frogs, bought in Woolworths. Now: I really don’t know how the wildlife photographers can take those fantastic picture that we see on National Geographic but I have to tell you, it must be a hell of a job! Me, with 24 rubber frogs in a very small place, I was able just to take a lot of pictures of tiny hands and feet desperately waving in the storm of the rinse! A pathetic performance for a photographer, I have to say. But at the end this inconvenient has become -as often happens- a good chance to create something hilarious.

The “Pop Wash” album shows three different set of materials: in the first two photos, two skeins of wool were used, then our beloved 24 rubber frogs and in the last seven pictures I filled my washing machine with 500 neon coloured straws.

» view Pop Wash

“Sinking” is the result of a research about water. It probably started with “Watercode” (you’ll find it a little down in the post) and, to be honest, I believe it will never end. Since I used to work with water (I owned an Aquariums shop few years ago) my relationship with this element is complex and goes from a pure scientific point of view to a more abstract (and, I’d say, aesthetic) approach. But anyway you watch it, is undeniable that water has an enormous influence on my life. You may laugh, but water (rain in this case) was one of the reasons that brought me to England… If you live in London you’ll probably understand what I’m talking about… The simple fact that you can get out of your home to warm your bones into the sun and then, suddenly, you can find your face washed by the rain, is for me an amazing sensation.

Just one last note: I called this work “Sinking” because of the feeling I was trying to transmit, a kind of mesmerizing underwater journey; but the title is also a joke, because all the pictures were actually taken in the kitchen sink…

» view Sinking

The idea here was to create a surreal vision of the area of London where I live (Ladbroke Grove/Portobello). I wanted to be simple and graphically clean and I wanted to give the viewer a sense of momentary dizziness, building images that seem absolutely normal at first glimpse. The simplicity of the design is actually achieved with a lot of work on perspectives in postproduction.

» view The Impossible City

Close to the place where I used to live in Tuscany, there is a small river that run fast through the maquis digging its way to the sea. In some hours of the day, right in the point where the fresh water meets the salty waves, two currents clash one against the other. The river pushes against the sea and the riptide pushes back. Right in the middle of this battlefield, the surface of the water forms a very peculiar pattern that repeat itself in a perpetual movement of tiny waves that rises and falls not going anywhere,  just  rolling and rolling in that very spot, endlessly.

Since the original colors of the pictures weren’t very attractive because of the muddy water of the river, I  tried many different solution with various elaborations before to go back to simplicity with a strongly contrasted black and white to enhance just  the pattern of the surface.

» view Watercode

As you’ve probably already understood viewing my photos, my favorite subjects are common objects and everyday situations. When I left Italy to come to London, I found a nice fully furnished apartment right in the heart of Notting Hill. The house was owned from many years by a young English lady so when I moved in, I found a lot of things that were at the same time ordinary and peculiar. Now: is not that we don’t have spoons and forks in Italy (ah ah) but, let’s say, they look slightly different…

Anyway this photos are once again (like in “Washingames”) an amusement… Ordinary objects viewed through a very, very twisted mind…

» view Funky Kitchen

Could sound stupid (and maybe it is) but I love to watch the sky. I’m sure there are thousands of people that don’t see it anymore. They maybe look at  it but they don’t really see it. That’s too bad. Life seems to run so fast and we are caught in this freaky freeway jumping from one exit to another so concern about our next appointment to force ourselves to forget everything else. And every day the sky (like many other ordinary and yet extraordinary things) is above our heads and we don’t see it anymore… Sadly, that’s just the way it is.Try this: next time you find yourself running, slow down and take a minute to watch the sky; and then realize that you’re looking at the sky… And that you are still a person capable to see it…

Out of time was intended from day one to as a multimedia project. The idea was to split the photos in squares or rectangle to be seen on separate video screen as slideshows, altering each fading timing so that after a while every screen would be desynchronized to each other. To this display, all blue and serene, I added two terrible photographes of a B-66 Destroyer and its bombs (Viet Nam, june 1966, courtesy of the National archives and records administration of the Unite States) to shock the viewer and remind him the precariousness of life.

Unfortunately, this installation was never built so I create a special page based on java applets to give you an idea of how it would look like.

» view Out of time
(for the presence of multiple javas, the page will take a moment to load)

This is a collection of photos I took through the years. They’re about nature but in some way they represent my own, inner nature. Some of the pictures are heavy elaborated in post-production, others are simple snapshots, others again are something in between; it all depends on the period I’ve took them. No strange meaning here, just a personal log of my past years trough one of my favorite subject, nature.

Sometimes colors seems to subtract something to a picture, so I’ve collected a group of black and white shots and I decided to present them in a separate album. After all there is also a “black and white” side in my nature…

» view My nature

» view My nature B/W

» view Swamp thing

» view Zen Sand

I like to play with freehand long exposure. You set the reflex for a 5-10 seconds exposure and then do exactly the opposite of what every photography guide teaches you: you go wild and move the camera in every possible direction!

In this specific case, the subjects are simple christmas lights. All the flaming shapes drowned by the light are the result of me going crazy shaking and turning my poor Nikon.

» view Candylights

In Italy I used to live five minutes away from the beach and I loved to go there during the winter. The sea in the winter is such a peaceful place, beautiful in a non conventional way, with its water dark and still and the sand clean and smoothed by the wind, with not a single human footprint for miles.

Walking for hours along the shore, I like to watch the invisible paths that wild animals seem to follow going from nowhere to nowhere. Yet, in some way, reading the prints left by their tiny feet, is not difficult to imagine them marching on the sand moved by rational behavior, rather that pure instinct…

» view Lifesigns

Trees are incredible creatures… Strong and  majestic, they can be seen as the watchers of the centuries. And, if we think about it, they are the closes thing on Earth to immortality. They are not eternal, of course, but compared to our short lives, their biology seems to have something miraculous…

Of course they’ve got no feet and don’t go walking around, so I don’t think that any human beings would like to be a tree just to live some hundred years longer. Yet, I can’t help it, when I take a picture of an old tree, I can’t stop wondering about the many, incredible things it has witnessed  in its long life…

» view Woodenskin

From 1997 to 2003 I owned an aquariums shop. Don’t ask me why, I can’t answer: as a lot of things in my life it just happened by chance. Anyway it was a very peculiar kind of shop. My concern was to share with the costumers my love for fish and nature, trying to get the people involved with the environmental issues trough the observation of aquariums realized following natural rules. The fish I was selling were all born in captivity (I still think that in these days there is no need to capture wild animals, so large is the availability of breaded fish) and the target was to prove that an auto-sufficient aquarium is absolutely easy to obtain if you have the passion and the interest to study how habitats work in nature. They were six fabulous years and I don’t regret a single moment of that time, even if at the end, I had to close my shop because it was a perpetual loss of money!

» view Aquascapes

Notes:

- A commentary about “The Victorian Explorer” can be found here »

- Other photo collections can be viewed here»

- The font used in the titles is JokerMan and can be downloaded here »

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The problem, if anything, is to express something detached from reality through sequences because this kind of photos are so deep-rooted with time to naturally become a representation of a specific moment (beaten by the interval between the pictures) and a specific space (the place where the action happens which, for obvious reasons, it’s always the same for the entire sequence). I have to say that I’m still not completely pleased with the results, but I think I’m getting there.

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Something different, even if directly connected with the shooting in sequence, are the subequences. In mathematics, a subsequence is a sequence that originates from a larger sequence and it’s obtained deleting some of the original elements keeping the remaining ones in the original order. Translating it in photography, I see a subsequence as a very large series of pictures that can be modify in space but not in time. Let’s see if I can explain it better with a visual example:

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This strange jigsaw is called “The garden” and was shot at my first home here in London. I walked through the little garden that was at the back of the house with my finger on the shutter release changing the framing while I was walking and then I reconstructed in Photoshop my route placing the pictures in a sequence that pauses and moves inside a rectangular space (which was similar to the original conformation of the garden). What I was trying to obtain was a faceted representation of the space obeying to the original sequence’s order but pausing from time to time to explore a specific fragment of space. The final result is (or it should be) a comprehensive view of the garden (with an intuitable specific shape and size, deducible by the existence of a predominant perspective) and, at the same time, a subsequence of pictures showing a more personal view of the place, with specific points of interests and an inner time sequence that should give the viewer the sensation of moving in first-person inside a graphic representation of the garden.

]]> http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?feed=rss2&p=272 0 http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=171 http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=171#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:45:15 +0000 Paz http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=171 This little project derives from a previous experiment about multiple exposure (culminated with the collection The flower and the leaf). Few months ago I went to Kew Gardens for a job for my agency. I went two days in a row because there were a lot of thing to see (and also because I really love the park) and I ended up with something like 200 good photos. Not all of them were suitable for Alamy but (as usual) I kept the “leftovers” anyway, planning to use them sooner or later.

The idea here is to give the viewer the feeling of discover some old, forgotten Victorian age plates, maybe discarded by the photographer because faulty (the double exposures). The English gardens work perfectly well to maintain the illusion of the historical period and the result is, I believe, quite convincing.

There are two versions for every picture, one in sepia tone and another one with faded colours. Still I’m not sure which one is better, they look very different, both good in their own way.

The double exposure gives the photos a peculiar atmosphere: it is real -it’s a photo after all- but at the same time there is something mysterious about it, something magical. To obtain this effect, I dug in my memories. When I was a child, I used to play in the huge garden around our house. I remember very well the feeling of been alone in what I considered my kingdom, how amazing was to play in that enchanted land full of fantastical creature and adventures.

I see the Victorian Age as a child’s faded memory because its recollections came to me through literature. Jules Verne, the Italian adventures’ writer Emilio Salgari, Albert Robida with its Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul and the wonderful films of Georges Méliès, I grew up with all of them and they still live in me.

The return of the Giant Hogweed

Multiple exposures are quite easy to blend in Photoshop: what you need is to open two or three or more pictures of the same size (not a lot more otherwise the result could be too much chaotic) and underexpose them a bit; then just use the “screen” mode to blend the layers together leaving the one at the bottom untouched. Another way to achieve a similar result, is to use Picasa, the free graphic editor from Google which has a specific entry to blend together multiple exposures. There are pros and cons about the use of Picasa for this specific task: the pros are that it’s fast and that the software takes care of the exposure (so you don’t have to underexpose the images before); the cons are that the resulting picture can be saved as jpg only and that the ppi can be (I believe) no more of 72.

» view here the final collection “The Victorian Explorer”

» view here “Limbus” created using the same technique

]]> http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?feed=rss2&p=171 0 http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=312 http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=312#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:58:30 +0000 Paz http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=312 Webcamgrams is an amusement that came out from a exchange of posts between yours truly and Davide di Nardo, my long time good friend. At that time I was experimenting with time-lapse video and, since -at usual- I didn’t have money to waste, I found a free software on the web to shoot webcam pics at customized intervals (AvaCam). Talking about the idea and showing Davide the test video I made, we start discussing how fun would be to put someone in front of a so set webcam and see how he/she would behave.

People act invariably strangely if they are left alone in a room with a video-camera at their disposal but usually the consequent video itself doesn’t show the weirdness of the behaviour at its best because realtime footage runs too fast and actions are compressed in an apparent -even if sometime peculiar- normality. But if you have the opportunity to pull apart the video and view the single frames as portrait pictures, well, you’ll have some surprises. A photograph, in its immobility, allow the viewer to freeze himself in time because what he’s watching is a moment frozen in time; and if you display an action divided in motionless seconds in front of him, he’ll perceive the passing of time with a distorted rhythm, submerging himself in an extended lapse of time. The result is an unusual outlook of the world where time doesn’t exists anymore but instead is narrated through a collection of moments invisible in real life which are, at the same time, fundamental concepts and final result of an action.

The way you display the pictures is also important; since the passing of time is recreated firstly dissecting the action and then pulling it back together again, the order you show the stills changes the perception of reality in the viewer. Like notes on a pentagram, the stills from a sequence can be played in an harmonic or inharmonic series increasing the sense of comprehension or dizziness in who’s watching. Same thing can be told about the physical position of the photos on a wall. The majority of people read and write horizontally from left to right, so if you hang similar pics in a straight line from left to right, that leads the viewer to interpret the space as a logical timeline where the action starts from the first picture on the left and proceeds until the last on the right. Hanging the shots in a straight line but this time vertically, still gives the viewer a sense of time but since this ideal upright line is something that seems to perpendicularly break a regular timeline, the actions portrayed in the sequence look like are happening in a very short period of time, almost simultaneously. And if you arrange the pictures in a group, the timeline is definitively compromised and the photos become a new object that’s isolated in time and contained in space by the comprehensive shape created by the picture’s assemblage.

The last one is my favourite method to show the stills and, in this specific case, I find useful to my purpose to arrange the portraits in an ordered square or rectangular shape because that’s how museums display objects (like insects or fossils in thecae); in this way, the viewer receives the feeling of examining a precious collection of moments detached from the original time or space and the result is a multi-faceted portrait of the subject.

The idea of using plastic toy dinosaurs in photographs of the real London, came from my personal nostalgic memory of the Japanese Godzilla’s movies. I remember the first time I went to the cinema; I was probably 7 or 8 years old and even if it’s not clear anymore how I ended up in the theatre with all my classmates, I’ll never forget the emotions I felt when the light went out and some crazy rubber -there is a person inside, how ridiculous!- creatures started to “acting” on the screen.

Please, remember that at the time in Italy the television was still in black and white and also the tv schedule was limited at few hours every day (starting at 5 in the afternoon with what was then called “the youths’ telly”, a series of documentary and kids’s programmes) so try to imagine what a 160 feet green monster projected on a cinema screen would look for a little girl.

Back to the story, I like to think that, in some way, we have found a way to coexist. Plastic dinosaurs don’t eat therefore humans will survive. Some trouble would be represented by their size and the fact that they actually don’t give a damn about who’s around (they don’t have a brain) so I presume that at some point the city council would try to embank them but this creatures are so huge and so difficult to control that maybe the whole town will be forced to leave.

For this photos I used a fake lomo effect and very over-saturated colours as a tribute to old movie poster and, at the same time, to transmit a snapshot feeling.

]]> http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?feed=rss2&p=200 0 http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=89 http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=89#comments Sun, 07 Dec 2008 12:49:05 +0000 Paz http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=89 New Atlantis is become a difficult project to handle. Not because I don’t find it interesting anymore (actually quite the contrary) but because I’m realizing it doesn’t have any appealing for a possible commercial future. That’s ok, non complaining really -90% of the things I like work on has very little to do with commercial prospects- but that’s the reason I couldn’t dedicate much time to it. I’m still working on expanding the New Atlantis’ world though, adding bits and pieces from time to time. Lately I’ve worked on a new point of view about the “after the fall” panoramas, a kind of cross-section showing the ruins of the metropolis and the wildlife reconquesting their habitats.

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Walking around my neighbourhood in West London when I first arrived in the U.K., I was surprised to see so many things visible through the house’s windows. Maybe it’s because Victorian villas have usually very large windows and unless you live with the curtains always closed, it’s impossible to keep your home (and your private life) separate from the outside world, but I found it an interesting starting point for reflections upon other’s people life, dreams and beliefs.

The thing that really struck me, was that in many houses the objects exhibited near the windows were turned outwards with the clear intention of communicate something to the outside. This peculiar way of interact with unknown people, inspired me to not only welcome that request for attention but also to record it and amplify it through the use of the camera.

The title originates from a famous quotation from Franz Kafka (I’m not sure but I believe it comes from the letters to his secret lover, the journalist and writer Milena Jesenská) that says:

“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”

Explore the photo enlarging it in a new window>>

What Kafka writes to express a pointless action (to kiss the air) as reply to the unfair and equally useless request to love someone from a distance, I like to see it here as a decision to bring the communication to a wider context as last resource when other social relationships fail. It’s not necessarily a pointless action and, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be interpreted as a desperate gesture inspired by loneliness but, on the contrary, as a desire born from love to overcome social and physical boundaries in search of intellectual elective affinities.

]]> http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?feed=rss2&p=458 0 http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=375 http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=375#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:51:33 +0000 Paz http://walkongrass.com/graphlog/?p=375

This is a classic exercise about the use of the additive colour model red-blue-green. The reason I spent some time playing around with the separation of the additive primary colours has a lot to do with my traditional photography training. All the people that, like me, learned photography using film, had in the past to come to a compromise because film (and consequent printing) was an expensive process therefore experimentation in photography was something to do in moderation. Today, with digital photography, this limit has been overcome and all creatives can enjoy the good old times experimentation with little waste of money.

RGB separation is today a very easy process; if once we were forced to screw one after the other three filters on the lens, today many graphic programs are able to do the same thing in a matter of seconds, giving us also the possibility to play around with every shade of the colour spectrum.

The pictures that follow show the setting in Photoshop I use to form the RGB layers. It’s basically the same workflow used to merge together multiple exposures: you start with three (or more) photos, underexpose them a little and then use the “screen” mode to blend them together. The difference is that before the blending, you can add an extra layer for the colour and, to simulate the filter, you have to set the blending mode of the colour on “multiply”. If you click on the pictures to enlarge them, you’ll understand better what I mean; it’s really an easy process (even though a little time consuming). The three original photos I use here are a sequence showing a bus travelling towards me.

Basic red/blue/green separation.

Cyan/magenta and yellow version

Orange/lime green and purple funky version

Aiming to keep himself fit, Edmund never misses the chance of doing some Parkour in between meals

The idea of Monsters of London sprout in my mind one afternoon I was sitting in a Pub. In the table next to mine there was a couple right in the middle of a painful breaking up. Painful for him, at least, a sweet chubby bloke wearing a yellow sweater; he was witnessing the disintegration of his love story with pure incredulity painted on his face. The scene was so sad, with the girl totally indifferent to the boy’s desperation and him, trying not to burst into tears right there, in front of everybody. I started to scribble on a notepad and I transformed the couple in two creatures and later, at home, I went through some of my old photos and put together my version of the scene, adding also a caption.

Led by his notorious phlegm, George welcomed Magda’s decision with moderate disappointment.

I really enjoy to translate everyday situations that draw my attention in cartoons. In my mind, these acetate monsters live among us but can’t be seen. They are from out of space, fallen on Earth for some mysterious cosmic event and learnt the art of disguise so well that only few people can actually detect them.

Looking at himself in the buildings’ windows of Leadenhall Street, all of a sudden Toto suspected he wasn’t on Xdrll anymore.

Master of disguise, Bernard had no problem to infiltrate the Saint James Park’s geese tribes looking for free meals and accommodation.

Anyway that was the starting point and my interpretation of these masterpieces was a very modest attempt only partially achieved, representing… Well, I’d say, a quite odd floating stone-egg !

Machines was a work originated from a simple study about shapes and forms but it became a three-dimensional oriented project when I started to build a scenery that could contain them.

At the same time I was working on another small project called Utopia. Once again, to improve my skills in 3D design, I was trying to build some stylized virtual cities. These metropolis were intended as idyllic place for an hypothetical future race of human beings even if, contrary to the traditional vision about utopian societies, my metropolis were huge and ultramodern in consequence of the exponential growth of the world population.

The cities of Utopia were just an exercise in the beginning, but then, as my landscapes evolved, I was cough up in a story that was growing in my mind

The story

Hundreds of years in the future (maybe thousands) the human race has evolved in a peaceful, enlightened society. In this ideal world, war is just a far memory of the past and peace is guaranteed not by dropping bombs, but by building schools. Utopia is finally a reality. Nature lives and prospers in synchrony with the urban growth and the modern cities are beautiful, almost ethereal in their architectonic magnificence: seductive arches, shining metal structures, hi-tech buildings.

During this “state of the art” era, something awakes in the depth of the Earth. Right from its “bones”, enormous spheres of rock emerge. They are living beings, animated by immaculate consciences. They were on the Earth before life itself was created but with the development of the civilization, they decided to return to the bowels of the earth, buried themselves to escape men’s notice.
Coming back to the surface, some of the spheres evolves in a new race of living beings. They’re not made of stone anymore, but appears as glowing spheres of light.

As the time goes bye, they keep changing in shapes and material: they want to communicate with men therefore, inspired by the human architecture, they become living structures made of shining steel.
At this point of the story, I start wandering about the possible end of this relationship between Machines and men. Were they really destined to live happily ever after? Well, I have to admit that this idea was fascinating… But then I began to think that in the real world such utopian society was sooner or later doomed to failure because it seems that the human race can’t live without suffering. Maybe this has something to do with the need to overcome our own limits, I don’t know. However, my illustrations became more and more dark and at the end I realized that what I was representing was the death of a civilization.

So, as you’ll see, after few bright pictures, comes the gloomy age of decline, when buildings collapse on their own foundation and skies are darkened by pollution and the evolved Machines die and turn once again to stone. And in the very end, when no living souls are left behind and the earth has become an empty and quiet desert, nature takes over ruins and rubble. And where once was civilization, only wilderness remains.

Please note: the complete display of the New Atlantis’ pictures is HERE >> (you’ll find it on the right side of the page).