Luca Fiore — Art and Photography Critic, Milan

The art I love — the photography I love — is art made by people who are still alive, or could be: people I can meet, question, follow over time. My preferred tool is the interview, because it is the least mendacious: it gives artists the space to explain their own reasons, and lets their humanity emerge alongside their work. (And how frustrating not to be able to interview Antonello da Messina, Piero della Francesca, Giovanni Bellini, Albrecht Dürer, Lorenzo Lotto, Tanzio da Varallo, Julia Margaret Cameron, Umberto Boccioni, Felice Casorati, Lisette Model, or Minor White.)

What I look for, in every conversation and every book, is the point where poetics and ethics coincide — where an artist’s way of making images is inseparable from their way of being in the world. The questions that interest me are never purely technical. They touch the existential dimension: why this, why now, why at all.

Sometimes a dialogue with an artist evolves into something else — an exhibition, a curatorial project. The relationship extends over time. In the best cases, it becomes friendship.

The photobook is where photography, for me, reaches its fullest complexity — a form capable of addressing what cannot be said otherwise, one that asks for readers with real trust in the gentle power of images.