My work starts with an investigation, research into the concept of being elderly. Through these portraits, I have addressed a condition common to many elderly people, namely being admitted to nursing homes where they will spend the last years of their lives. By gaining a close-up understanding of the life and personality of the subjects in the portraits, I had the opportunity to observe certain changes that occur in the elderly people living in these environments. In particular, I noticed a condition of twofold abandonment. The first is a kind of emotional abandonment, in which relatives and friends are increasingly distant and their visits gradually become less and less frequent; this is reflected on the psyche of the elderly people in the nursing home who, feeling that they have been forgotten by everyone, shut themselves away in a state of loneliness, feeling useless and left alone to serve the last few years before they die. Consequently, the other sense of abandonment that I have been able to observe is progressive alienation: every day is the same as the one before, today is like yesterday and tomorrow will be like today. As a result, day after day, the elderly people start to forget where they are or how long they have been there, what they are doing, what their role is and, in the end, they even forget themselves. Everything seems increasingly indefinite, far away and confusing. In translating this condition into a photograph, I tried to recreate in the portraits a slow disappearance of the person and their identity, almost like a shadow that disappears without a trace, memory or sound.
