TITLE: No Man's Land

We travel to distant lands looking for the richness of wild landscapes, often with hopes of coming face to face with hundreds of animals at once. We are constantly chasing something sensational to happen in the right place at the perfect moment, while secretly hoping we would never have to face the end of that moment - we fear a certain kind of bitter disappointment. The feeling that many people have is a continuous research for extraordinary events often dictated by the speed and brevity of the moment we can live in these places. Thus, we are surrounded by pristine landscapes and are convinced to be far away from the rhythms that crowd our daily lives, only to realize that the desire to concentrate too much in too little time has not allowed us to notice the small details that follow us along the journey. We immerse ourselves in nature without being able to obliviate our ego and our urge to register as much as possible. That means we fail to feel satisfied with the little time spent in a place far from home. Approaching a country like Namibia, I tried to eliminate the need to see as much as I could in that little time, focusing my eyes and my camera on the small details of this wonderful land and trying to bring them back to a minimalist dimension. The intentional exclusion of color and the search of strokes of light in a land that is overflowing with elements were the means I used to exclude my dimension as a western traveler, thus becoming part of a place that is no man's land.

AUTHOR: Matteo De Bernardini (Italy)

I'm a photographer based in a small town in Italy.
Photography has always been a passion of mine since I was a teenager, but for the first years it was just a simple representation of what my eyes could see.
While studying architecture at university, I tried to coniugate both my academic studies and my passion for photography.
The outcome could have probably been architecture photography, but the reality is that a lot of the architectonic principles we learnt in school can be applied to images from different fields in order to enhance our perspective of the world and to give us new rules to observe it.

My goal is to represent a reality that I can interpret through my camera, trying to give new perspectives to the people who are seeing my pictures.