Photographing light

A photographic project which conceals all the complexity of action and thought in the simplicity of a photograph: this is the secret behind Giacomo Benecchi’s images of Berlin. 

Lights standing out from the city to make it into a recognisable urban element are the focus of his study entitled The Scariest Night. His intention is to define and identify urban spaces by the reflected light of streetlights, lighted windows and headlights, creating a surreal landscape which is intentionally distant from the one we are used to experiencing in our daily lives. But every photograph is actually the product of several shots assembled in the post-production phase, an intentional manipulation of reality that makes the city look so unusual it seems to be real. The effect is emphasised by the absence of human figures, for elimination of all references to proportion makes the subject even more indefinite.

The photographer does not consider our atavistic fear of the dark, supposedly obsolete following the invention of artificial light, to be actually extinct, but still present today "in the form of monsters of glass and cement and neon and tungsten reflections".