voltarWOMAN ALTERED LANDSCAPE
In September of 2008 Rome became the latest Italian city to increase fines for prostitutes and their clients. A few months before, Roman’s citizens had elected a right wing Mayor for the first time since Benito Mussolini, and now the new Government wanted to satisfy its most conservative electorate. The declared purpose was to clean up the streets and strike at the rackets that force women to sell sex, but the effort made by the Institutions was totally inadequate to the problem’s dimension. More serious and long-term policy measures were needed to fight a market that just in the Eternal City produces 130 million Euros a year. There are an estimated 1200 sex workers, including transsexuals, 70% of whom work out in the open, soliciting on main roads and in truck stops. Police checks were insufficient and strictly enforced only in residential areas, while the outskirts of the city were completely ignored. It was there that I focused my photographic research. I wandered through the countryside around Rome, exploring those regions that prostitutes had peacefully colonized. In the case of Rome those areas are also parts of a land full of mythology. A land celebrated by the words of illustrious travelers, such as Chateaubriand, where millenary roads go by. The panoramic format helped me build a formal balance between subject and background, while the places sacredness gave back to the sex workers their dignity and erased judgmental involvement. These human figures, women or transvestites as they were, appeared to me like epic, modern farmers immersed in the majesty of a scenario they are now completely part of. They become the vital ingredient of an archaic and rural landscape, the sign of continuity with the past, the element that immortalizes human history.
Gallery
