"Dark Cities Paris - The Eiffel Tower"

pigment-based inkjet print on Hahnemühle William Turner

signed and dated (pencil) on verso, certificate

When we go into a dark place from a bright one we live a kind of disorientation, our eyes struggle for the first minutes to get used to the dark. With every passing minute, slowly, thanks to the residual light that filters under a door, or maybe from a street lamp far away, reality begins to take a different shape. The dim light rests on the surrounding structures by drawing a game of achromatic surfaces, painting more or less intense shades of dark gray that almost reach the black. As happens in a pinhole camera where a tiny light beam paints the picture on the negative, images of "Dark Cities" come to the eye of the viewer slowly, as if he were in a dark room: a vision that go over the real, straight to the soul, conveying empathy feelings I felt about places that I went through.
This is the key to enter into the "Dark Cities". Enter in the universe of light, or, in this case, of its absence, both from the point of view of the shooting and its reproduction, in a delicate game of shadows and darkness that leads us to discover common and uncommon places in a vision far from usual. In my night travel accross the major European capitals, in which humanity is almost absent, there is silence, loneliness of a man immersed far away in the dark. A man apart, hidden, which observe evolution of humanity. Light and darkness are the two opposite sides of my narrative project on urban landscapes. Opposite and complementary, indispensable to each other as black to white, night to day. This first trip in the dark urban starts from Paris, the City of Lights. Which better place to start capture the dark side?
(Daniele Cametti Aspri)