D-DAY / The Uchronic Film
A young tourist walks through the antiques market in San Telmo, Buenos Aires. Among so many knick-knacks, an old Pall Mall cigarette box catches her eye. When she opens it, she finds a 35mm film inside. The woman only buys the film and takes it to her country. A few days after arriving in her town, she developed the film in a photo lab. The person in charge of developing the roll tells the woman that only 11 photographs could be rescued and that some of them are "slightly out of focus".
About the work:
More than once I thought that if D-Day failed, I probably wouldn't have existed.
My grandparents were Italian immigrants who lived in the south of the country in a small town called Scido, in Reggio Calabria. There were many stories that they told me about how they lived through the World War II, but there was one that marked me and it was the day when the Americans arrived in town, after the nazis fled just a few days before. That event (a consequence of D-day) was decisive for my grandparents to leave Italy and then go to live in Argentina. Country where I was born and currently live.
In my first steps with photography I discovered the work of Robert Capa and certainly the series that I like is that of D-Day. Both the photographs and their story (which due to an accident the development process can only save 11 of 106 frames) I find fascinating.
Many times I imagined what those photographs had been like, the ones we couldn't see.
One day while I was playing with my daughter with some plastic soldiers, it occurred to me to put together a small scene and I improvised some shaky shots with my cell phone. The result had seemed quite good to me and it was then that I was encouraged to make the series. Finally, to give it a more interesting twist, I wrote an uchronic short story about the origin of the photographs.
