Text: Ugo Baldassarre – Translation: Giorgio Aprile
Discovering a new author and his beautiful stories that take us to distant lands to discover ancestral customs and rituals.
“The passion for stories, narrated in images is what initially brought me closer to photography. This narrative need was then combined with the desire to tell about people and their experiences in particular.
My name is Andrea Calandra, I live in Rome and I am a professional photographer.
There is no real beginning to my photographic life, it is something that I have always loved to do since I was a child.
The images I admired by avidly leafing through magazines like National Geographic intrigued and stimulated me, while photographing was extremely gratifying; I have therefore always found my freedom in this expressive medium.
The strange ancestral bond that I have always felt towards the African continent took shape in the first reportage (Journey to Masai Land), which I made in 2016. Going to live with a Masai tribe, an experience that changed me and that allowed me to create the story I wanted, I had the opportunity to be able to tell their daily life from within.
Since 2018 I have been working on another reportage (not yet completed), again in Africa, this time the western one, between Togo and Ghana, where my attention has turned to the most intimate and ancestral aspect of a people, religious believe and in particular Animism, where in Togo it still represents the dominant religion.
It is of course a very multifaceted theme and if you think of Africa in its size, Animism, still practiced in various parts of the continent, can also take very different forms.
More than documenting, therefore, a religious creed, my goal is to tell magical Africa, that set of sensations and strange coincidences that closely resemble that literary movement of magical realism, which I love and which has often led me back mentally, living the mother continent. I do it in the only way I know, through images, of the faces I love to photograph, of the situations and certain objects and places that accompany the spiritual life of those territories.
I discovered in the micro 4/3 system the most suitable for my way of photographing, especially in the wide depth of field which you can easily access while maintaining brightness, as well as in its small size, an aspect that I really appreciate.
The images I have made so far have been taken with Olympus Pen-F and M1 Mark II bodies, equipped respectively with Zuiko 17mm f/1.8, Zuiko 25mm f/1.8 and on the M1 II Zuiko 17mm f/1.2 PRO and Zuiko 25mm f/1.2 PRO.”
Andrea’s project is still in full swing; we thank the author for this beautiful preview exclusively for Micro4/3 Italia.
Contacts:
Andrea Calandra
www.andreacalandra.com
Instagram: @calandra_andrea
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