Silver 2015 / People / Family

Daniela, portrait of my mother

  • Photographer
    Niko Giovanni Coniglio
  • Prizes
    Silver in People/Family

I started photographing my mother to learn how to use a camera. I continued doing it in order to spend some time with her. I'm still photographing her to witness and tell our story. Photography is a sort of bridge in our relationship and helps me to know her. With this, I don't mean that photography can fill the communication gap between us. Spending more time with my mother, I realized that our relationship is charging itself with life's difficulties and contradictions. What I mean to say is that photography is one of the very few contact and discussion moments between us, which had become the main one for several years, now. The project is called "Daniela, portait of my mother", but it's not only my mother's portrait. In this work I represent her life's situations or events, but also the ones that directly impacted on me, as well as my own family experiences. Sometimes I simply try to stage situations that become real, and a memory, and an experience in the very moment I shoot them. "Of course, some painful cracks developed in my soul and I lived away from reality for who knows how long". This is one of the sentences my mother wrote in her diary, which offers an important reference point for this work.