Temporarily anonymous by Mario Mencacci
There is a mask for the family, one for society, one for work. And when you're alone, you remain nobody.
Luigi Pirandello
Mass. Contemporaneity is defined as a mass society. In the social sphere we lose our individuality to become, especially in certain urban contexts, crowds, people, or populations. Mario Mencacci's work offers us a reflection on the loss of identity in mass social contexts but it does so in a poetic and sometimes dreamlike way. Mencacci's lens captures individuals on a train, during a journey.
No matter who they are or where they are going, what matters is the journey itself, as Mencacci himself tells us: "When I went to school, and even after to go to university, I had to travel by train. Sometimes, a little fantasizing and a little following the sensations, I imagined that a group of people, starting a journey, was no longer "a group of individuals" but simply "a train".
That these people once left lost their individual identities to become a single element, as if there were an effect of fading in on the train and then an opposite effect, in which concreteness and identity are recovered, once they arrive at their destination. So I tried to represent the abstraction that we potentially become once we leave for a journey, returning to concreteness when the journey ends.”
BIO
Mario Mencacci has been awarded at the contest " Where the street has no name" organized by deviantArt USA in 2013; awarded at the international contest ImagOrbetello in 2016; twice among the finalists at the Italian Street Photo Festival in Rome (2018 and 2021), and twice at the London Street Photography Festival (2017 and 2019); winner of the OFF circuit of Lucca 2020. He is one of the organizers of the PSPI Pisa Street Photography International Festival in Pisa, whose first edition was held in September 2022. In 2021 FIAF awarded him the honor of AFI (Italian Artist Photographer).
