CECK THE COLOFON OF CITIES 16 AT DEDICATED PAGE
Namastè by Emanuele Carpenzano
Those who love India know it: you don't know exactly why you love it. It is dirty, it is poor, it is infected; sometimes she is a thief and a liar, often smelly, corrupt, merciless and indifferent. Yet, once you meet it, you can't do without it.
Tiziano Terzani
Emanuele Carpenzano's photographic work Namastè imposes itself on the panorama of contemporary travel photography as a deep and visceral investigation of urban and social space, capable of transforming the chaos of the streets and the intensity of marginal contexts into an incredible kaleidoscope of humanity and contradiction.
Through the lens, the photographer does not limit himself to mapping the geometries of metropolises or the architecture of historic centers, but tunes in to the deep soul of communities, documenting the coexistence between an imposing past and the dynamics of a global modernity. Carpenzano avoids the traps of exotic pietism; For him, public space is a living organism, a theater of resilience in which even the poorest realities reveal an extraordinary vitality, where dusty streets become improvised playgrounds and the thresholds of tiny houses are transformed into study rooms.
This work elevates photography to a form of creative meditation that captures life in its many nuances. This can be perceived in the visual management of large collective events, where the density of the crowd is returned as an enveloping sensory experience, but above all in the sacred places of the soul, where the rituality of death and the urgency of daily life run on parallel tracks without any antithesis. Carpenzano documents this interpenetration by offering, as he himself declares, the "projection of it that my mind has built over time; a mosaic of smells, colors and sounds that remain indelibly imprinted".
Namastè thus demonstrates that urban photography is not a simple description of a territory, but a journey of encounter and profound personal transformation
Sonia Pampuri
