Dedicated to Travellers

To those who aren't afraid of the big, heavy suitcase.

To all those people who think that flying isn't the definitive way of travelling, and confront a journey by bus from one country to the other. 

The bus. The ultimate cart towed by invisible mules. 

To the ones who sit in impossibly small spaces between seats and dive into the night, watching the sleepy, dark landscape flowing by. 

Maybe they'll dream of where they will go next. 

Or maybe these people are the dreamers, moving around, seeing friends or family scattered around Europe without minding the two or three days it will take to reach them. 

To all of you who split a journey in many legs, a bit by bus, the other bit by train, the final one hitchhiking perhaps. Because the journey is a dimension in itself, a suspended sphere, an experience. 

Sometimes uplifting, sometimes exhausting. 

Dedicated to those who consider the means of travelling more important than the destination.

The Underground Diaries: Random

Colours and friendly faces.

Everyone comes to London for the Frieze Art Fair. If Rome is caput mundi, London is caput ARTE.

9 October 2011: Flower Power - Jubilee Line, London

Frieze's Week: Artists and Curators - Hammersmith & City Line, London

Frieze's Week: Artists and Curators - Hammersmith & City Line, London

        

The Underground Diaries: Possessions

"Please remember to keep your belongings with you at all times. Any unattended item may be removed or destroyed." I think I could easily cry my eyes out if someone destroyed my bag.

There's all your life in a bag, especially if you are a woman.

Circle Line, London - She loves London

Hammersmith & City Line, London

The Underground Diaries: Sucked In

The blissful unawareness of some great moments. Visually speaking.

Central Line, London

The Underground Diaries: Generation Next

Full score plunder for the Underground Diaries today.
I have to say I don't really look for images, rather, they just appear to be under my nose and I can't help but press the...oh, I wish there was a normal side button to press on the iPhone! My lumpish attempts to keep the thin, black, rectangular thing still with two hands while trying to press the camera icon with a nail - or my nose, for crying out loud - would be worthy material for a documentary.

Central Line, London - Kidz

On the wake of this article by Tom De Castella about the iPod making us all antisocial, I got some inspiration for images.

All images Metropolitan Line, London

Generation next.
But I don't believe the end is near, as you are always free to press the off button and listen to the polite silence around you. Aren't you?

Finally, I caught two people on the same car reading a book that I absolutely loved: "One Day", by David Nicholls. Same book, different editions. I could even tell what point of the story they were at.

Circle Line, London

The Underground Diaries: a Friday morning.

Sometimes Fridays can be like Mondays.
Weariness seems to struck, and you're absolutely not ready for the week-end. Like saying "it is Friday already, and I am not." But thankfully, the ones with more energy are always there.

23 September 2011 - Victoria Line, London

23 September 2011 - Overground, London

23 September 2011 - Spots and Squares. Overground, London.

The Underground Diaries: A Lifetime Together.

You saw it happening between your grandparents.

Even your parents are going along that way. Not to mention you in-laws.

After, say, 30-45 years of marriage, it can happen that you can't really stand each other anymore. 

The ailments. That unnerving bad habit of his that you didn't manage to change. The growing apart.

That is why, when I see something like this on the tube or anywhere else, I can't help but smile blissfully. 

14 September 2011- Circle Line, London. 

I took a similar picture in Rome, and published it here.

The Underground Diaries: Fashion Spotting

Like lot of other "igers" (detestable hashtag neologism), I am now completely addicted to Instagram.

Either for the nostalgia for a past era that, through our parents fading pictures, seems more real than ours, or for the frenzy of experimentation, this simple app seems to awake the potentially good photographer in you. The result is, you are always taking pictures, and one or two do turn out to be fairly good (even though you have no idea of what you're doing and only rely on your natural sense of colour and composition). Well, filters help to make something helplessly ordinary looking coooool.

Therefore, I am now starting a new section of the blog: The Underground Diaries.
I have recently stumbled upon TubeCrush.net, a website where people upload pictures of blokes they fancy, spotted by chance on the tube. The idea is that the photographed subject should recognise himself on this website, read the message attached to it and contact the person who took the picture, perhaps to live happily ever after.
How. About. That. slash Good. Luck. To. You.

Anyway, far from criticising or endorsing any dating method - we all need some love and romance, don't we? - the pictures I will post are, too, taken on the Underground. I have always been fascinated by the suspended dimension of the Tube and the varied chunks of humanity on it, coming and going from point A to point B, crossing by point C and reaching point D backwards, basically ignoring one another. I am not going to bang on the concepts of alienation, city life, etcetera, I just like to spot beauty into the ordinary.
The man I married once told me that, whenever he travelled on the tube, his main occupation was observing people and try to understand if they were happy.

So, this is the first shot of an ongoing series___

18 August 2011 - Hammersmith & City Line, London

___Do you think they are happy?