Passionate about architecture, Mauro Sini looks for essential lines, sharp and precise shapes also for his photographs. It is a study of the void, to explore following one’s inner rhythm.
Mauro, how did you meet photography?
I met it relatively late, when I was 34. Before that, being very attracted to architecture I started studying at university, but left soon enough. My love for photography was born when I was a kid, when I had the luck of having access to a very old camera, from around the beginning of the XX century, and that opened a whole world for me. Then that love was abandoned and picked up again when I was 34, when I decided I wanted to be a photographer. In this transition I was helped by my two teachers; one is Flavio Renzetti, sculptor and painter, the other is Massimo Costoli, photographer. Massimo, in particular, opened my mind and changed my way of thinking and watching from a photographic point of view. Anyhow, it is thanks to him that I discovered who the Mauro Sini photographer is. Since then, I have followed a career as a fashion and interior design photographer and on the side I kept up my artistic search.
Architecture is still in your life, though, as many of your subjects are buildings.
Yes, architectural photography is almost a need. I look for lines and sharpness. I often voluntarily exclude the human figure, unless it has a purpose in the context I am portraying. I love to study the space, which is by the way what has always fascinated me in architecture. What I do in my photographs is to attempt to delimit the void, cutting out spaces in an emptiness, from my very personal point of view.
There also might be particular projects, such as Mitoraj, which I realized in Pompei, where the human figure is present, yet sublimated by the statues.
Anyway, my creativity is expressed like this, by taking away from the frame instead of inserting in the frame. Even in landscapes, in fact, I look for lines and essentiality.
Do you use colour as well or it always black and white?
I use colour only when black and white does not enhance the image. And if in black and white I often take advantage of the contrast, with colours I privilege the dark ones, I tend to tone them down. So, in my photography, colour is rare and when it is there, it is dense, never bright.
Actually, the pictures I take when I am at work, are always in colour, and quite often very bright. Black and white is my niche, my refuge, where everything works as I want and I can read in my own rhythm.
What is your method? Do you follow a plan or do you let your inspiration guide you?
Besides some specific projects, such as Mitoraj, I let myself be guided by what I see. Sometimes I go and look for intriguing places. I shoot what I see, and having always travelled for work I find myself often in very inspiring places, where I sometimes go back to take pictures in my own time. Now for instance, I am working on pictures of industrial archaeology realized in a ruin in Argentario, Tuscany, where I have every intention of going back to take pictures of the same places, yet at different times of day. This is a particularly structured project, but often my shots are casual: I walk around and I am struck by a shadow, by a reflections or the light coming through a window.
