A room with view


My work is a meticulous reconnoitering of the ordinary, which I seek to render intensely and immediately present. I want to imbue ordinariness with a touch of enigma, with a meeting of the familiar and the unfamiliar, so that the images—which can be disarmingly simple—become mirrors in which viewers face their own memories and private histories. This is why I photograph interiors devoid of personal objects or any specific context. I create an ambience of narrative potential rather than determined meaning.

These unadorned settings seem so anonymous that they could belong to anyone; the absence of the persons who have inhabited them is even more meaningful than their presence and creates a suspended state in which the normally familiar and domestic become strange and unsettling. I have always been fascinated with manipulating light to exploit its endless expressive potentia…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 84, March-April 2001.




Elisa Sighicelli