Umberto Verdoliva
Lights, shadows, contrast, sarcasm, and the hunting of visual poetry. The atmosphere of city life ignites my curiosity, leading me to capture real moments with the camera. Ordinary life creates the most attractive and charming pictures
-Umberto Verdoliva
Umberto Verdoliva is from Castellammare di Stabia near to Naples. he currently lives in Italy. He captures street photos mainly around Italy, focusing on his daily life in depth looking for the beauty in humanity around him. He does not plan his outcomes, he goes out into the city streets and looks into crowds, waiting for the right moment to capture. When taking photos he focuses on the relationship between man and the urban environment. Verdoliva became a photographer to be closer to people and enjoys meeting people when he goes out to take photos.
He shows his love for photography by organising workshops, exhibitions, portfolio readings, presentations, writing articles and insights on his photography. In 2010 he became a member of the international collective “Vivo” until 2017. during this he founded “SPONTANEA” an Italian collective dedicated to street photography from 2013 to 2019.
Verdoliva is inspired by photographers, Fan Ho and Henri Cartier-Bresson for their use of light, shapes and strength in their images.
https://www.lensculture.com/umbertoverdoliva
https://artofcreativephotography.com/streetphotographers/umberto-verdoliva/
Examples of his work:
What is a dream?
Two real moments captured over time, merged to create something meaningful, balanced, and unique. Recreating a scene, an atmosphere, an ephemeral reality from something that existed in different times and places has been the leitmotif of my work.
-Umberto Verdoliva
The images from “What is a dream?” are made on film, double exposures which is two or more photos put together. Verdoliva plans these images when making them hoping the final outcome sparks the viewers imagination.
I’m constantly roving around the city looking for “connections” between things, people, feelings. When I’m photographing, I look at everything as if it were a dream. With my double exposures, I try to create new realities: merging, mixing, matching elements far and wide to produce new, unimagined meaning.
https://www.lensculture.com/articles/umberto-verdoliva-what-is-a-dream
Images from What is a dream?:
I particularly like this project and the outcomes he made and the technique of double exposures. I like how they add more layers to an image and tell a more in depth story.
Procida
Why the island? Because it is the point where I isolate myself, where I am alone: it is a point that is separate from the rest of the world, not because it really is, but because in my state of mind I can separate myself from it.
-Giuseppe Ungaretti
Procida is one of the islands part of the Flegrean Islands off the coast of Naples in southern Italy.
In this path, which still continues, Procida has been my transit, the refuge, a door revealed with the key of my camera, it has allowed me to find myself again, to discover, to leave out the tiredness and misunderstandings of a life that I might have wanted. different.
“But most beautiful of all, the Island Not Found” are the lines of a poem by Guido Gozzano, an imaginary place that is there to be continually reinvented by those who perceive its soul and grace.
On the island, however, we also find a landing place, a temporary stop for a transit, a stop to recover strength and then continue. The island and the sea, elements that have always been contained in the narration, have allowed me to abandon myself to the beauty of the wind, the light, the smell of salt and my own silences, giving birth to the ancestral desire to tell and reveal the profound enigma inside me.
In the term “isolation” the word island as a place constitutes its backbone, and the very proximity to the mainland accentuates the dimension of distance.
-Umberto Verdoliva
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/10830087-procida
Images from Procida:
I like the way these images have strong lines and angles, making them very strong and bold images. If I was to use this style for my own double exposure images it would add texture and shape to my images.
Image Analysis
Content – The image includes a man walking on a pavement into what looks like a plastered picture of a close up shot of a women, almost like he is walking into a new world. The street picture is taken at eye level from a slight distance so he could get the man and the pavement in the picture. Verdoliva takes his pictures at random when he is out and looks for possible outcomes. The image has no specific name but is part of his ‘What is a dream?’ series which is about getting the viewer to use their imagination.
Formal Elements – The image is in black and white which creates a high tonal range throughout the image emphasising the contrast between light and dark. The lighting would have been from the natural daylight which translates to the images’ softness, it is not harsh and bold. even though the image has layers to it, it still has a short depth of field and feels 2D. There is a lot of textures in the final outcome from the wall in the background, the peeling plaster sheet and the close up portrait adds to the textures. These create quite harsh lines, almost like dry brush strokes in a painting, adding depth and grain to the image. The image contains a mixture of geometric and organic shapes like the hair in the portrait of the girl and the run down wall in the background and geometric shapes like the pavement lines which also is a form of repetition. The white solid line which is the edge of the paper that the man is walking into could link to the idea of walking into a new world as Verdoliva likes to get people to question themselves and their imaginations while looking at his images. The background image with the man walking follows the rule of third as the horizon is in the bottom third and the main subject is off centre.
Mood – The mood overall is very dark and eerie. The softness of the image also creates a ghostly feeling because it is very light and empty. The Women also looks like she is looking over her shoulder as if the man is following her which creates a atmospheric feeling.