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To photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
We have been living with advertising for decades by now. Advertising photographs, showed in always bigger sizes, are used to cover a relevant part of our visual field and melts into urban furniture. Photographs enter our consciousness and we become so accustomed to it that we just believe it is a natural part of the city landscape. The image proposed, which generally deals with the unreachable myths of our society, amplifies contrasts and similarities of those people who have to face the overlapping of different lives. This is why somebody loves advertising, somebody hates it, but nobody can just be neutral towards it. Taking pictures of the advertising image inscribed in its real environment, taking into account everything that surrounds it, can reveal many secrets and be a starting point of important observations. Sometimes the night, or some casual reflex, can turn the advertising image into new geometries and boost our imagination.
The pictures that will follow have been shot in Milan, mostly in a short period between 2007 and 2008, in some of the city's hot spots. The shiny atmosphere belongs to an era that had still to encounter the global financial crisis. People's portraits and landscapes are the frame, while the advertising posters are the real focus, bringing up bitter sweet emotions, and sometimes a smile, in the observer.
