Federico Torra (b. 1986) is an Italian photographer who works and lives in Milan. He graduated in History of Art at the Università Cattolica of Milan in 2012 and later he attended the CFP Bauer in Milan and acquired a diploma in Photography in 2013.
Since then his research focused on the urban landscape and his inhabitants and then gradually turned on the representation of architectural space and its polymorphous nature.
Dans la ville blanche is one of his last project.
I’ve waited for a long time to visit Lisbon.
The books, the poems and the memories of friends who spent a while in this city were telling me about a sense of melancholy that I would have found there.
I though about Lisbon and the inhabitants as descendants of the seafarers pushed by the spirit of discovery to go beyond the thin line that links the Ocean to the sky; by contrast to the past I found instead a quiet humanity, in a sense peacefully resigned to a world that has no more unknown lands to explore.
The proximity to the sea has instilled an ancient wisdom to the city that seems to have absorbed from the colonies in South America and Africa a unique light and a vegetation, so much luxuriant and tropical in the numerous gardens.
I got stroke by the fact that a blinding light spreads and filters in every corners and narrower streets of the city, at a point that the days seems to last a few hours more here in the western border than in any other part of Europe.
Text and images © Federico Torra
